Scared
by notmanos
Summary: An alien lifeform pops up just as violent incidents plague the city. It claims to know Jack, and says he's responsible for it, but he doesn't recall it at all. When it takes one of the Torchwood team, he has no choice but to figure out what it wants.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: Torchwood and all characters are the property of the BBC. No infringement intended. This is me goofing off on a science fiction idea I had nothing else to do with. _

_N.B.: Takes place between season two and season three. _

* * *

_**Scared**_

* * *

1

The blood curdling screams brought Ianto Jones running.

He had to shoulder his way through a panicked crowd running in the opposite direction, threatening to pull him along with them like a swift moving tide. The fact that he had his gun out seemed to have no impact whatsoever. They were so scared that they didn't care that he might be another kind of threat.

This was what being with Torchwood did to you. It made you run towards the danger rather than from it, even when every sensible cell left in your body – not many, to be honest; there hadn't been many to begin with – was telling you to run with the rest of the crowd. This time, he could almost forgive himself for the small rebellion of his fight or flight response.

Why the Weevils decided to come up on a busy shopping street near Cardiff Bay was anyone's guess. Why they were being so suddenly, mindlessly aggressive was another. Ianto shouldered his way through the crowd, glad for his failed attempt at playing rugby as a teen teaching him at least how to function in a scrum, and found a Weevil snacking on a woman sprawled on the sidewalk. She looked like someone's grey haired old mum, only her throat was now a raw red mess, a puddle of deep crimson liquid beneath her head reflecting the early streetlights. The Weevil seemed to sense him, looked up with its gleaming, glass like eyes, its muzzle stained red with the woman's blood. Ianto didn't even think – he raised the gun and fired, hitting it in the head. It jerked back and hit the asphalt hard, legs and arms akimbo. Despite it being a head shot, he knew it wasn't dead; the skull of a Weevil was too thick to be penetrated by a mere bullet. No, it was the impact alone of a close shot that put it down, knocked it out like a donkey's kick would. He should kill it, especially for killing and eating a Human, but general policy wasn't to kill them if you didn't have to. He didn't have to, not yet, but if the fucking thing regained consciousness, he would kill it, with little remorse. It ripped out a little old lady's throat; it had wasted his mercy. He didn't need to search for a pulse to know the woman was dead.

Ianto didn't have a long time to dwell on it, as he heard Jack down the street shout an obscenity, followed by a thud as a large Weevil hit a parked car hard enough to leave a dent in the side and set off the loud siren of a car alarm. Ianto tried to ask him if he was okay over the comm, but the alarm was so loud it totally drowned any response. Gwen said something over the open channel too, or so he thought, but all he could hear was the sound of her voice; the syllables were gone.

Ianto ran past another body, this an overweight man dressed in a t-shirt and slacks, laying on the sidewalk outside a cafe in a pool of blood almost twice as big as he was. He saw no injury, but blood had soaked his t-shirt burgundy, even though most of the pool was the color of ink. Arterial blood, internal; he'd seen enough death by now to know the different colors of blood, to know when someone had lost too much to survive. But two bodies already? They just got news of the Weevils. They were on a rampage; this was a massacre. Why?

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a dark blur, a Weevil charging for him, but he didn't pause his run, simply shot, and he got it. Where he didn't know, but it went down, and that was all he cared about at the moment. But he was nearly knocked over by two tumbling figures as they fell out of a small alley in front of him, a stocky Indian man fighting with a growling Weevil. The Weevil had rolled on top of the man and pinned him down, but Ianto pulled his stun gun out of his jacket and jabbed it right into the back of the Weevil's neck, sending the electrical jolt straight down its spine. It whined briefly and then went limp. The man kicked the alien off, and then asked him, as he scrambled to his feet, "Thanks, mate. What are these things?"

There was no official story to tell civilians. Sometimes they said "cult members in masks", but the man was so close to the Weevil he had to know it wasn't a mask. Would mutant do? Probably not. He didn't know what to tell him, so he decided not to tell him anything. "I don't know. Where did they come from? Did you see?"

The man shrugged, then started looking around at the chaos. It was sinking in that the attack was not on him alone, and that he was very lucky to be alive and in one piece. "I was just taking out the garbage when this thing just jumped out of nowhere and tried to bite me. Umm, where are the police?"

"On their way. You need to clear the area now."

The man seemed to really look at Ianto for the first time. "You're ... you're MI-5 or something, yeah?"

Why did he think MI-5? Was it because he was wearing a suit and tie? Or was it because he had a gun? Both? "Or something. You need to go, now." He pointed behind him, towards the backs of the fleeing crowds. "That way. Run."

Ianto had started ahead towards Jack when the man said, "I could help!"

"No you couldn't." Another Weevil surged out of the alley, and Ianto had to shoot it twice to bring it down. The Weevils were so agitated. Why? What was riling them up? They weren't a milquetoast species, but they usually weren't this aggressive, not without cause. They preferred the darkness, which was why they generally stayed in the sewers. The sun had just barely gone down; the sky still had that curious half light, a sort of lavender color that hadn't quite committed to dark blue yet. It was too light a backdrop for the stars to be visible. Something drove them up from underground, something that enraged them and drove them to this. On the one hand, it wasn't hard to drive a Weevil to violence, it seemed to be their go to instinct. But why come out into the light, why just rampage as opposed to hunt? (If there was a group of them, they usually hunted like a pack, several of them singling out prey. As far as Ianto had seen, they weren't grouping, and they weren't hunting; they were just grabbing anything that moved. Odd.) The last time that had happened, Gray, Jack's brother, had sent out a signal that they responded to, brought them up and brought them up angry. But there had been no signal, not to their knowledge, and Gray was still frozen in cold storage. This was something else, but something almost as bad.

"Little help here," Jack shouted, as an incredibly big Weevil threw what must have been a perfect shoulder tackle straight into Jack's midsection, throwing him back against a wall so hard that it must have broken bones. Pain creased his face briefly, but Jack still brought an elbow down hard on the back of its neck, making it drop him. But it roared in rage and went in for a bite.

Jack kicked it away, but another one lunged for him. Maybe because Jack had a cut on his head, just trickling a tiny bit of blood, but the smallest hint of blood could stir Weevils up like a group of sharks. Ianto was finally in range and shot one high in the back, and it went down hard and fell on top of Jack just as the big one came back after him. It stopped and looked at Ianto with its black, alien eyes, snarling like a mad dog. Ianto didn't stop his forward charge, but he still felt something cold slither through his gut, fear given form. It was the biggest Weevil he had ever seen, almost seven feet tall and probably three hundred pounds, which would explain why Jack was having a hard time subduing it. How many shots would this one take before it went down? A half dozen? A dozen? Was someone feeding the Weevils steroids?

Jack tossed the stunned Weevil off of him, and it hit the large Weevil side on, sending it falling to pavement. "Catch," he taunted before getting to his feet and retrieving his gun, which had been knocked from his hand. Although he had a big cheesy grin on his face, Ianto saw him wince and use the wall to help himself stand. He'd been hurt, but he wasn't going to admit it until it was all over, if even then. That just wasn't Jack's way.

He flashed Ianto an inordinately cheerful look, the adrenaline rush making his blue eyes bright, but the look dropped instantly, and Ianto sort of knew why, even before he shouted, "Behind y-"

He was turning when the Weevil slammed into him, sending them both sprawling to the asphalt as it roared in his ear, its fetid hot breath washing over him like the smoke of burnt garbage. This Weevil wasn't as tall, but it was heavier than him, and it had pinned the gun between their bodies. Ianto could fire it, but he wasn't sure if he would hit it or him. As he tried to turn the gun and kick it off, it sank its jagged teeth into his shoulder.

He screamed involuntarily – it hurt; it hurt like fuck; serrated teeth by the dozens tearing through skin and muscle like it was the flimsiest of fabric, scraping bone – and bucked, finally getting some room, and he was able to wedge the gun up and shoot the Weevil in the gut. His finger convulsed on the trigger, he kept firing, but it sank its teeth deeper and started to shake its head like a dog with a toy, tearing more flesh, startling a deeper scream from the base of Ianto's throat.

Gunshots hit the Weevil from another direction, blood exploded from the top of its skull and splattered on Ianto's face, and it loosened its bite enough that Ianto was finally able to shove it off him. It might have tried to go for him again, but Jack was still emptying his gun into the Weevil; he kept shooting until it finally stopped moving. "Ianto, are you all right?" he asked, crouching down beside him. But Jack didn't wait for an answer, he looked at his shoulder and grimaced before shouting into his comm, "Gwen, I need you here now, Ianto's hurt."

"I'm okay," Ianto lied. His shoulder felt like it was on fire, the warm blood crawling down his chest and soaking into his back feeling like saltwater. Muscles in his back and arms were starting to spasm, but he didn't know if it was from pain and trauma or actual damage. He didn't actually want to know.

A shadow rose over Jack, one way too large to have been Gwen, and Ianto raised his gun and fired. He hit the huge Weevil in the chest, making it stagger back a step, and looking around and seeing it, Jack pulled out his own stun gun and stabbed it deep into the big Weevil's chest. It took a moment, he had to hold it on for a very long time, but the stun finally took and it collapsed like a poorly made bridge.

Ianto sat up and almost screamed in pain as muscles inside his wounded shoulder pulled and shifted. Hie right arm was pretty much useless now, it felt limp and unresponsive, and he was glad he had the gun in his left. It was empty, though, he could feel it in the slight weight, so one handed he ejected the empty clip and tried to make his right arm move, pull a full clip out of his jacket pocket. He was able to shift his right hand closer to him, but the amount of effort and pain involved made him pause. He was holding back the pain as best he could, but he felt his face flush and closed his eyes, trying to control his reaction.

He felt Jack reach over and pull a full clip out of his pocket. He knew it was Jack because he knew his scent. "You're gonna be a stubborn bastard, huh?" Jack asked.

Ianto opened his eyes and met his gaze. "It's the Torchwood disease."

"You'd think they'd have a cure for it by now." Jack threw him a wink and a half grin, reassuring him it was okay without words.

Jack had put the clip in his right hand, so Ianto could slam the clip home into the butt of the gun, and rack the slide so there was a bullet in the chamber. It sent a lightning bolt shudder of pain through his arm, but Ianto refused to acknowledge it. Ignoring it didn't make it go away, but he could almost fool himself.

Jack had to reload his own gun in a hurry, as he had already spun and fired, taking down two other Weevils who were trying to converge on them. (Scent of blood, bringing them in like sharks.) Ianto raised his gun and took down another one before other gunshots joined theirs, and Gwen came sprinting up, stopping long enough to turn and walk backwards, gun aimed out at any approaching threat. She trusted them to cover her back. "I've counted seven bodies, Jack," she reported. "At least a dozen wounded, maybe more. Why the hell are they freaking out?"

"Got me. They didn't like how the World Cup turned out? It's not like they're talking."

They all shot and brought down a Weevil before Gwen took a chance and crouched down beside Ianto as Jack stood guard, trying to watch all the angles as Gwen gave him a small, reassuring smile before gently peeling back what there was of his suit coat and shirt near the wound. He could feel the blood coursing down his back like hot oily sweat, and wasn't really surprised by the way Gwen scowled at the wound. "He needs a hospital."

"I hate hospitals," Ianto said, almost a plea. He didn't want to go if he absolutely didn't have to. Gwen gave him a troubled but sympathetic look, a friendly pat and squeeze on his uninjured arm.

"Who doesn't?" Jack replied, but he wasn't looking at him. He was looking around, frowning in thought, and said, "They're retreating."

Both Ianto and Gwen joined him in looking around. The Weevils were disappearing, sinking back into the shadows, returning to the sewers. "Why?" Gwen asked, genuinely puzzled. "They outnumber us ten to one. We've barely brought down a dozen."

Jack shook his head, still searching the streets as if they may have held an answer. "I don't know. None of this makes much sense." There was a distant wail of police and ambulance sirens, and that seemed to kick Jack out of his musings and back to now. "Come on, let's get him out of here. We'll deal with the cops later."

Ianto hated to be the one that had to be helped from the fight, but it seemed there was nothing for it now. Jack and Gwen helped him up, and Ianto couldn't help but notice that Jack grunted in pain as he straightened up, draping Ianto's left arm across his shoulders. Yeah, Jack was hurt, but he wouldn't say it. Not that it mattered with Jack; whatever the injury, he would heal. He always did, the lucky bastard.

Ianto and Jack holstered their guns, but Gwen kept hers out just in case. They walked out through eerily abandoned streets, save for the blood, bodies, and wreckage. It was like the aftermath of a bombing. Ianto assumed they'd eventually get the answers to this senseless slaughter, but he wondered if any answer would ever be good enough.

* * *

Gwen was glad she'd held on to her old police ID, as it opened many doors without making her liable to answer any questions. She could just say "Official business" and leave it at that. People didn't like it, but they knew they had to accept it.

The hospital's emergency room was sheer chaos, overflowing with people, but she flashed her old ID to the charge nurse and used her stern cop voice, which got them through the maelstrom and into a triage area right away. Jack got funny looks for his World War Two greatcoat, but Ianto wearing a suit actually helped foster the illusion they were police. A lot of the higher up detectives, not beat cops but the ones on special investigative squads, wore suits. Technically Ianto was a tad more dapper than they were – Gwen could remember them with their rumpled shirts and invariable stained ties, the suits off the rack numbers mostly from discount shops – but there was no time for that level of scrutiny now.

Ianto needed stitches and blood. There was some talk of possible rehabilitation for the damaged muscles, possibly even surgery, but Ianto just wanted them to patch him up so he could go now. He really didn't like hospitals; not in the normal way, like everyone did, he'd started sweating, his eyes getting a furtive look of panic in them the longer they stayed. Once the nurses hooked him up to a saline drip to bring his fluid levels back up, Gwen pulled Jack aside and asked, "He has a hospital phobia? Why hasn't it showed up before?"

Jack shook his head briefly, casting a worried glance in Ianto's direction. "It's not hospitals themselves, I think it's staying in hospitals he doesn't like. After the battle of Canary Wharf, he was in one for a few days. He wasn't the best patient."

Canary Wharf. She remembered her Torchwood history – the fall of Torchwood One, in London, during the aborted Cybermen invasion. Ianto was one of the survivors, and so was his half Cyber converted girlfriend Lisa, although no one knew about Lisa except for Ianto, who somehow managed to hide her out. If she remembered that part correctly, Ianto had dragged Lisa from the battle. Had he hurt himself in the process? Maybe he was already hurt, and in his desperation to save her, he made it worse. That would track. Ianto loved Lisa so much he seemed to become temporarily insane. He risked all their lives, the very safety of Torchwood, for her, but bizarrely, Gwen couldn't blame Ianto for that. If she was him, she'd probably have done the same thing. If it was Rhys, she'd never stop fighting to save him, even if it was impossible. "What was wrong with him?"

"Burns, broken bones, internal bleeding." Jack grimaced at the thought. "He was caught in the building collapse."

"Before or after he saved Lisa?"

"After. But he didn't seek medical treatment. He just went around injured for a full day before he finally passed out. He had been bleeding internally that entire time; he probably should have died." Jack sighed. "I don't know how he didn't die. Welsh luck, I suppose."

"I'm not sure my luck has ever been that good," she protested mildly. She wouldn't mind if it was. "Did you ever ... did you ever talk to him about that? That whole thing? Canary Wharf?"

He shook his head, and at her incredulous look, he said, "We're guys, Gwen. We don't talk about things like that." Before she could contradict him in any way, he changed the subject. "While we're here, maybe we should find out how many casualties there were."

"We could do that at the Hub later."

Jack shrugged a single shoulder. "We could, but I'd rather keep busy for the moment. I just don't get it – what set the Weevils off?" From the way a muscle jumped in his jaw, she knew this was really eating at him. "I don't like unanswered questions."

"You're not alone."

Jack gave her a nod and wandered off, going off on his casualty hunt. Should she have told him he had some of Ianto's blood on his coat? Well, this was a hospital in the fulcrum of a disaster – everybody probably had a bit of blood on them.

Gwen returned to Ianto's bedside, where he was actually sitting on the edge of his gurney like he was going to hop off and leave at any second, except the saline drip was tethering him there. He was bare chested because his shirt and coat had been taken off so the wound could be tended to, and he had refused to put on the miserable paper gown they gave you in these places, and it occurred to Gwen she almost never had seen Ianto like that. Well, once, but she didn't get a good look at him since he and Jack were both shirtless and in a clinch at the time. Hell, had she ever seen Ianto without a suit and tie for that matter? She wasn't certain she would recognize him if he just showed up one day in jeans and a t-shirt. He had a surprisingly good chest, just a little bit fuzzy, but nice muscular definition and a flat stomach. Not gym definition, but that made sense, as who the hell had time to go to the gym when you worked for Torchwood? You got your exercise chasing aliens and looking for artifacts that could destroy the world. There was little time left for a life, not to mention a hobby.

The enjoyable view of his chest was marred by the fact that blood glistened, both wet and semi-dried, on his right side, both front and back, and the wound, while now stitched up, still looked grisly, red and angry. The stitches were little black exclamation marks on his skin, looking like staples in his flesh. "You should really sit back," she advised him. "You've lost a lot of blood."

"I've lost more before," he said, almost petulantly, but he frowned at his own statement and added, "I'm sorry, Gwen. I hate being here. Me getting bit was just stupid."

"No, it wasn't. It's just luck that we all weren't bitten or worse. And you know Jack's hurt, he just won't admit it, the big baby."

That made Ianto smile. "He's broken some ribs, I think. The non-fatal wounds always take longer to heal."

She nearly asked how he knew that, but he was Jack's lover after all. That probably meant he knew a couple of things about Jack that few other people knew. Although, considering how many lovers Jack had probably had over his long existence, you'd think that all Jack's secrets were out there, possibly published in encyclopedia form.

Ianto sat back as she had asked, and rubbed his eyes like he was tired. "So many people died tonight. Why? And how did it happen so fast? As long as I've worked for Torchwood, Weevils have never acted this way. I mean, the danger was always there, what little we know about the race suggests an almost boundless capacity for violence, but you could say the same about Humans. Just because it has the capacity doesn't mean it will act on it."

She sighed, sitting on the opposite edge of the gurney. The adrenaline buzz was wearing off, and she could feel herself starting to crash. Yes, a fight always made you wired, but afterwards, when the danger was over, the body seemed to want to find a nice place to collapse. But was the danger really over? The Weevils surged up with no provocation that they knew of, killed as many people as they could, and then mysteriously went away again as if it had been a normal night. It could happen again, it could be happening now someplace else. There was no one at the Hub to tell them.

No, that wasn't totally true. Toshiko had created an automated alert system, a "lobotomized A.I." she'd called it, where the Hub's own computer network would monitor incoming anomalies and reports, and alert them automatically if something was wrong. It wasn't like a Human being, though; it wasn't someone you can ask questions of, someone you could talk to. She still half expected to hear Tosh speaking to her on the other end of the comm, or maybe even Owen. She shoved it away, because if she thought about it she would tear up, and it wasn't the time or place for it. Later she could have a good cry, but now she was still on the clock. "Right now, all we can do is try to find out what triggered this, so we can prevent it from happening again." She patted his hand and just left it on top of his, and he made no move to pull it away. Since the deaths of Owen and Tosh, they had become a tighter unit, but there was no way Torchwood could keep functioning as only three people, even if one of them couldn't be killed no matter how many times to you tried. She and Ianto were still mortal, still fragile, and always courting death in one way or another. Except, of course, she had already decided they weren't going to die. She and Ianto were going to live long enough to be the first people to actually retire out of Torchwood (which, considering the high and quick death rate, meant they just had to live to forty to accomplish it). She had no idea how to implement it, so she just decided the power of positive thinking would be enough. They weren't dying, full stop. There – she decided it, now the universe was going to have to live with it.

A television was on, high on a wall mount in the far corner. It was almost impossible to hear over the cacophony of voices in the crowded hospital, but the flickering images included scenes near Cardiff Bay, garnering their attention. A news report on what had just occurred. What were the media going to say about it? She doubted the truth would come into it. A stocky but muscular Indian man was briefly interviewed, and Ianto muttered, "Good, he got out."

From what Gwen could see of the news crawl at the bottom of the screen, she read what the official statement on the matter was. Her eyes widened in disbelief as she said aloud, "Gang violence?" They were going to blame this on gang violence?

She exchanged a disbelieving look with Ianto. "Well, you know Cardiff is the new East LA," Ianto said, in his usual arid deadpan.

Oh yeah, they were the next Oakland. Gwen rubbed her eyes, and wondered how stupid the home office thought the public were. If this were any indication, it was remarkable the public was breathing on its own.

Wait until Jack heard about this.


	2. Chapter 2

2

You had to love Humans, you really did, but on the downside, some of their leaders were the biggest idiots they could possibly find. It was like you needed a certain level of idiocy to ascend to power. (Come to think of it, that made some sense.) Jack took little comfort in the fact that it hardly got any better by the fiftieth century.

So, gang violence. It was like they wanted people to know there were aliens running around Wales. But he wasn't going to worry about it, because, if worse came to worst, he could dump Retcon in the water supply. (Oh sure, the home office would come down hard on him for it, but he didn't really work for them anymore, and if they were going to be idiots, two could play that game. He prided himself on being the biggest idiot in the room. Or, as Ianto sometimes diplomatically called it, stubborn.)

Although the casualty count could change, right now solid figures had twelve dead and twenty three injured, excluding anyone injured by other people panicking, and Ianto's bite. He'd talked to a few witnesses, but the story was roughly the same: they came out of nowhere, and started attacking people. No one was aware of anything odd happening before they showed up; no noise, no sight, no smell. So they still had nothing to go on, no tangible reason for the Weevils to act the way they did. Was he going to have to go into the sewers again? He hated the sewers. It wasn't just the smell – although it was mostly the smell – it was also the fact that there was a special kind of muck in the sewer that stained absolutely everything it came in contact with, and was an absolute bitch to get rid of. And the Weevils could get territorial and tear him to pieces, but that seemed like a distant third.

It wouldn't be so bad if he had a hunting partner, but he'd already promised Gwen she could take tonight off (of course it was before this Weevil revolt, and he always reserved the right to pull her back in), and Ianto was in no shape to hunt, although he'd probably insist on trying. (He could be an idiot too.) He'd have to go it alone, which wasn't new.

Jack came back to find Gwen on her mobile, trying to assure Rhys that the attack "wasn't that bad" (he hadn't believed the news's gang violence report either), and Ianto was starting to slip into a coma. He'd been given a major painkiller, and while it made him happy, it also made him melt; he was like a giggling puddle of Human on the gurney. (Not an actual puddle, as that would have been disturbing and messy. Jack had actually seen that before, although it wasn't a Human, it was an Arcturan, and it was a natural thing for that species, but that was neither here nor there.) He needed Gwen's help to get Ianto up and off the gurney, but once Ianto was on his feet, he leaned into him heavily and Gwen could only stand by while Ianto admitted he loved painkillers. He was such a mess that Jack asked him if he'd eaten anything since lunch. The answer was no, and he wasn't surprised. A synthetic opioid derivative on an empty stomach? It would totally wipe him out, and possibly make him barf.

Jack told Gwen to go on home – how could she possibly miss out on a dinner with the in-laws? - leaving him to drag Ianto back to his flat all by himself. Once he loaded Ianto into the SUV, he just sort of half slid down the passenger seat, and Jack was convinced he was going to have to carry him up the stairs.

Ianto lived in an apartment complex that could be best described as shabby chic, a five story cracker box of a building with a neo-Victorian brick facade that had started crumbling early thanks to its proximity to wind off the water. It gave it an aged, slightly decrepit look it really hadn't earned. The one thing it had going for it was a nice view of the bay from certain angles. He'd asked Ianto why he lived here when he probably could have afforded something better, and he'd only said it was _"Close to the warehouse district"_. Meaning it was close to where he hid Lisa and her cobbled together Cybermen rig while trying to get into Torchwood Cardiff. Jack wasn't sure if he still lived here due to a certain inertia (when would he have time to apartment hunt anyways?) , or if it was some kind of continued penance for failing her. It was hard to say.

Ianto was able to stand up on his own and get out of the car, but he staggered a bit, so Jack ended up helping him anyways.

The lobby of the building was small and grotty, with a wall of mailbox cubbyholes on one side and a bulletin board on the other, and a small corridor that led to the ground level flats and a communal washer and dryer area. There was a wooden staircase on the far side, leading to the upstairs flats. There was no elevator, which he thought may have been a safety violation of one sort or another, but this building was fairly old even if not as old as it appeared to be.

The stairs creaked a bit as they went up, giving a wonderful haunted house atmosphere to the place. The atmosphere would have been complete if it wasn't for the smell of stale beer on one of the landings. Jack was pretty sure he heard snatches of an argument on the third floor, a man and a woman screaming obscenities at each other. Nothing like a good domestic incident to liven up an already shitty evening.

Ianto – of course – lived on the fifth floor, meaning they had to climb all the way to the top. But on the plus side, it was a quiet floor, and Jack already knew it had a hell of a view. From Ianto's living room window, he could see the tops of small buildings and several flat top warehouses, leading in an irregular path to the blue-grey mirror of the Bay. He could see why he might not want to move.

Flats always told you something about its occupants, and Jack felt he had a good grasp of quick, cursory readings by now. For instance, a Thomas Kincaid painting on the wall? Hideous taste, not a person to be trusted. Sex toys displayed in the living room? Either a person with a perverse sense of humor, a sleaze, or riddled with an STD. Possibly all.

But Ianto's was a bit of puzzle. If he'd been two people it could be explained, but since he lived alone it was an outward sign of an irrevocable dichotomy. The furniture was masculine – the sofa and chair matching mahogany brown leather, the coffee table wrought iron and glass, a huge old dark maple bookcase that wouldn't have been out of place in a law library – and for art there was a framed movie poster of Le Samourai, with a young, handsome Alain Delon in profile, which always got Jack's approval. The film itself, one of Ianto's favorites apparently, was a French existentialist noir masterpiece, which at least signaled he had good taste, although it was also a warning that he probably liked foreign films you had to read instead of watch. (This turned out to be partially true. Ianto was a movie buff who would watch almost anything.)

But there were soft touches, unexpected splashes of color, a riot of green and fragrant herbs growing in pots on the kitchen window (his kitchen, really a kitchenette, always smelled of mint and Japanese basil as a result). Amongst the Stephen King and Ken Bruen novels on his bookshelf was a whole bunch of philosophy tomes that could have killed a Sontaran if you hit them with it, heavy books that could double as bricks in a pinch. Jack had asked incredulously if he had actually read them, thumbing through a book on John Stuart Mill that smelled of mildew, and Ianto proceeded to tell him what a fascinating man John Stuart Mill was, and probably one of his favorite philosophers. Wow. Who the fuck had a favorite philosopher? (Jack vaguely recalled meeting Mill once. Nervous man; a bit jumpy. Pretty smart, though.) Jack didn't even know how to judge that information.

His flat was essentially three rooms: the living room/kitchnette, a bedroom, and a bathroom. There were signs of bachelor mess at times – unopened mail on his coffee table, piling up into little drifts, unwashed dishes in the sink – but for the most part he kept his place pretty tidy. His bedroom occasionally had clothing thrown on a chair or on the floor, but not often. Being at Ianto's place often made him feel like a tremendous slob, and he'd always considered himself neat. If he had seen his place before he took him on at Torchwood, not only would he already have known Ianto was bisexual (the dichotomy given form), but he would have guessed he was hiding something. He was a man used to clearing up loose ends, used to hiding his own trail, and you didn't get that way if there wasn't a reason for it. And if anyone should know that, it was him. No one could hide a trail like Jack could, but he had to give Ianto grudging credit for almost getting something past him.

In his flat, Ianto collapsed on his sofa, boneless as a rag doll, and Jack had to go and turn on a lamp since it was so dark. The curtains were still open, but it was full night now, and the nearest occupied buildings were too far away for their anemic lights to cast much illumination on the scene. "Do you know what's going on?" Ianto wondered.

Jack turned back to him and shook his head. "No. I'm thinking something set the Weevils off, but I don't know what."

In spite of the drug glaze making his eyes glassy, Ianto's look was surprisingly suspicious. "Are you being honest?"

Jack let out a small sigh of disgust and put his hands on his hips. "I wouldn't hide something like this. Give me some credit."

He nodded. "Okay. I just ... I want to understand this. I want there to be some stupid reason that we could fix in five minutes."

"It'd be nice." Jack's ribs still ached, but not as bad as earlier. Broken ribs were a real bitch; he hated those almost more than anything else. Besides death, of course. You never quite got used to that. It was like falling a thousand feet, hoping you'd black out before impact, but never blacking out. You were aware for the entire fall, and felt the impact obliterate you ... and yet, you woke up again. You woke up again, and you remembered every single second of your latest fall. It would be maddening if he allowed himself to think about it.

Jack went ahead and made himself busy, looking in Ianto's fridge to see what he had. A couple of take out cartons of Chinese and Vietnamese food, some lager, and a couple of apples. "Ianto, you've fallen behind in your shopping. Finally, I have proof you're Human."

"Ha. What are you looking for? I could use a beer."

"If you want to lapse into a coma, yes. I'm looking for food. You need to eat something."

"No I don't. Beer me."

"No." He almost wondered why Ianto was being so stubborn, but he already knew: he wanted to erase tonight from his memory, at least for a little while. Getting totally wasted would do that. Jack had moved on to the cupboards, which were sad in a different way. This was proof he lived alone: he had exactly five plates, five bowls, five mugs, a set of some sort. He had seven mismatched glasses, and three saucers. And that was it. Since he had no company over, there was no need for more. He just had enough things that he could go for a couple of days without doing dishes, but that was it.

Jack was mildly surprised when Ianto's arms encircled him, and his face nuzzled his neck. "I know something else we could do."

He chuckled faintly. "I'm sure you do. But I don't think that's a good idea right now."

"Since when aren't you in the mood?"

Fair point. "Since you're going to pass out in the next ten minutes. I like my lovers conscious."

"Keep me awake," he teased, his breath warm on his neck. He gave him a gentle bite on the neck before nipping his earlobe.

Jack groaned. He felt good, he had to admit that, and he was never one to deny himself anything that felt good. He turned in Ianto's arms and met his mouth with his own, kissing him with both passion and a certain amount of gratitude.

His skin felt almost too warm, a typical problem with certain opioids, but Jack didn't mind at all. He pressed him up against the counter, the weight of Ianto's body against his curiously erotic, and he felt his warm hands snake under his shirt and slide up his back. Before things got too far, Jack made himself push away from him, which was difficult. Ianto was no one's idea of a bruiser, but he was stronger than his measured personality might make you think. Ah, youth. "Okay. We need to stop now -"

"No we don't," he replied, smiling, and kissed him again. He was a very good kisser.

So much for fighting his impulses. He let Ianto slip off his coat and lead him into his bedroom, but once they were in there he pushed Ianto back on the bed and climbed on top of him. "No means no, Ian."

He smiled lazily up at him, a deeply sexy smile that he had never shared inside Torchwood. Then again, Ianto shared almost as little as Jack did; he doled out information about himself in bits and pieces, even though he really had nothing to hide anymore. But at a certain point, it became a habit. "Not with you it doesn't."

Again, another fair point. "You know too much about me. I'm afraid I'll have to kill you."

That made Ianto's smile broader, which he was hoping. God, he was a beautiful man. He'd never know it, but he was. "Do it later." He reached up to grab the back of his neck, and pulled him down into another kiss. Jack figured it was a good thing he couldn't die permanently, because he was sure Ianto was going to be the death of him.

He pinned Ianto's wrists down to the bed and started kissing down his body, starting with his face and moving slowly down his neck. His skin tasted like salt and rain. Jack had just moved down past the hollow of his throat when he realized that Ianto's breathing had changed, and there wasn't even playful resistance in his arms. Jack sighed into his chest. "See? What did I tell you?" He sat up, straddling Ianto's hips, and saw that yes, he was asleep. "You should listen to your elders." It was disappointing, but he wasn't surprised. Also, he had to admit he was kind of tired.

He'd been up since last night. He was trying to track a (thankfully deactivated) Illurian detonator that had been sold in a jumble sale (!) - the person who found it assumed it was a piece of an old train set, not aware it was actually the more dangerous part of an explosive device that could put a hole the size of a bus in a warship. Since the jumble sale didn't keep records, it took a lot of legwork to finally track down the buyer, who turned out to be a train obsessed elderly man who admitted he hadn't recognized the part at all, but assumed it was "from Eastern Europe". Jack bought it off him for five quid; it was now locked away at the Hub. But he still hadn't gotten any sleep.

He returned to the living room and picked his coat up off the floor, tossing it on the sofa before turning on the TV and checking out the news channels. The only reference to the incident was some talking heads discussing the surge in gang violence in London. (How much of that was Torchwood London activity? Supposedly they weren't back on their feet yet, but he'd worked for them long enough to know you could never trust them.)

His phone hummed, but it was just a text from Gwen: _Tell me there's a riot. I need out of here._

Jack smirked, and texted back: _Have another beer. A big one. S_he was having dinner with the in-laws tonight, and having met Rhys's parents, he could see why she was begging for the sky to fall. But hey, when you got married, you married the entire family. Even if they were insufferable, she'd have to find a way to deal with them. He'd found total avoidance or alcohol really were the best ways to cope.

He yawned, and it sent a twinge through his rib cage. Damn it, not fully healed yet. He switched off the TV and took a good look out at the city as seen from the living room window. There was one corner of the near horizon that was almost totally dark, a part of the warehouse district where the streetlights were accidentally or deliberately dead, and he wondered if there were Weevils in those shadows, prowling the streets, looking to even an unknown score. He wished he could talk to them, that he could ask a question and get a concrete response, but their language was still indecipherable and up for debate – most of Torchwood was convinced it didn't exist. But Jack was sure it must have, even if it just sounded like random noises to them. They could have even communicated by nothing but smells; he knew of a race in Oocull system that "talked" that way. But he could hardly bring up Time Agency stuff. Not only was it a violation of basic time travel protocols, but many Humans weren't even sure there were other planets capable of supporting life out there. Wait until they found out how many there actually were, and how diverse the lifeforms were. It'd blow their minds.

He went back to the bedroom, where he undressed Ianto and tucked him beneath the covers. He was so out of it he didn't even stir at any point. Jack kissed him on the forehead, and felt how warm he was. Almost feverish. But painkillers could have weird side effects, varying from person to person. In his case, he was immune to about half of them, much to his annoyance, but considering how long he'd been around, immunity was probably a given. At least he rarely got sick, although Time Agency mass immuno-boosters probably helped most there.

He could have gone back to his place in the Hub, but there was an open bed here now, and he really should keep an eye on Ianto. So he stripped and threw his clothes on the chair in the corner and crawled into bed beside him, where he was giving off heat like a furnace. Maybe he really wasn't good with heavy duty painkillers; maybe his wound already got infected (technically, Weevil's were cleaner than Humans, and just about any Earth bacteria that came in contact with them died a horrible death, but they could still get sick. Their alien physiology prevented anything from crossing species barriers, but it still could have irritated Ianto's injuries). Might have to scan him in the Hub tomorrow.

Tomorrow sounded good. Maybe things would look much better by then.

* * *

"_Help us."_

It was a faint voice, ethereal, almost not a voice; it was a kind of a whisper on the wind, but amplified and doubled. Ianto thought maybe he hadn't heard it, maybe his mind was playing tricks on him, but then he heard it again -

"_Help us."_

_- _and it sounded like it had been spoken in his ear.

He woke up and started scrabbling for his nightstand, where he had a gun hidden in the drawer. Once you started working for Torchwood, it was impulse to take weapons with you wherever you went. Once you knew there really could be a monster under the bed, you couldn't take safety for granted.

But as soon as he was awake, his eyes open, he realized he must have been dreaming. Fingers of pale yellow sunlight were stabbing through his curtains and painting the wall, and along with nearly full consciousness, a sick ache awoke in his shoulder, throbbing like a second heart. Oh crap, he _had _gotten bitten. He was hoping that was part of the nightmare.

He wasn't alone either. He didn't need to look to know it was Jack, his warm body conformed to his, his arm over his stomach. Jack stayed over? He frantically tried to remember what happened last night. Jack kissed the back of his uninjured shoulder, and asked, "Nightmare?"

He must have woken him up too. "Kind of. I thought I heard something."

"What?"

"Someone asking for help."

"Know who it was?"

"No." He paused and considered it. "And I can't remember anything else about it either. What happened last night?"

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Why are you answering me with questions?"

"Am I?" He could hear the smile in Jack's voice. Bastard. Who the hell could be so cheerful before their morning coffee? Well, Jack could, but it was bloody unfair.

"Jack," Ianto said darkly.

Jack got out of bed and stretched, seemingly showing off his body. Obviously his ribs no longer hurt. "C'mon, what's the last thing you remember? You remember being at the hospital, right?"

Ianto thought about it, and he was surprised at how hard he had to concentrate. But he vaguely recalled looking up at the telly, and ... no, that couldn't be right. "Did they blame it on gangs?"

Jack smiled and dipped his head. "They did. They were on heavier drugs than you."

Oh no. The drugs. Ianto sat up with a disappointed groan. "Oh god. What did I do?"

Jack's smile grew wider and more mischievous. That was bad news. But he waited until he was on his way out of the bedroom before saying, "Nothing out of the ordinary. You couldn't wait to jump my bones."

Ianto sighed and dropped his head in his hands. Wonderful. He was hoping Jack was making that up to taunt him, but he suspected he wasn't. He took far too much glee in saying it.

Jack poked his head back in, and said, "What? You're adorable wasted and randy."

"Adorable. Great. I'm a Hummel figurine."

"Those aren't adorable, those are cloying. You're more like a teddy bear. A horny teddy bear." Jack couldn't keep from laughing, barely spitting out the last words before cracking up.

Ianto glared cold, terrible wrath at him, but Jack disappeared from the doorway, still laughing. It wasn't the most embarrassing thing possible, but it was still embarrassing.

He heard Jack mucking around in his kitchen, but he wasn't quite up to standing yet. His brain was still sleep fogged, and while the dream – nightmare – had faded away, a sense of unease lingered. Saliva flooded his mouth, and he was suddenly nauseous. He breathed carefully, trying to force the sensation down. The fact that he could now smell cooking bread didn't help much. "I'm gonna go see a gal who owes me a favor, see if she has any inside info on what's going on with the Weevils. Since I have to head out to Brecon Beacon, and Gwen's probably hung over, you don't have to head into the Hub until the afternoon. Why don't you take the morning off? Rest up, get some shopping done before you starve to death."

When he was sure he could talk without vomiting, he asked, "How do you know Gwen's hung over?"

"Dinner with the in-laws last night."

"Oh." Yes, that would explain it. Rhys's mother was one of the scariest things he'd ever encountered. You'd probably need to be drunk to face her without jumping out of your skin. "Who are you seeing in Brecon Beacon?"

"No one you know." Jack came back in with a small saucer and a mug of tea, both of which he handed to him. "You're probably feeling nauseous. Eat something, you'll feel better."

Every now and again, Jack would surprise him like this. It was both kind and creepy all at the same time. "How did you know?"

"Painkillers on an empty stomach. How d'ya think you got so fucked up last night? You're just lucky you had a slice of bread left."

Even though he was half convinced he was going to vomit, Ianto took a bite of the buttered toast. For a second he was sure he was going to spew, but the urge passed. He washed it down with a gulp of tea, and did feel a little bit better. Normally Ianto hated tea, but he did have some peppermint tea up in the cupboard because his great Aunt Sophie swore by it as a minor cure all when you were sick. Right now, he could almost believe it. "Thank you for not attempting to make coffee."

Jack scowled at him. "I make damn good coffee. You're fussy."

"Having taste buds makes one fussy? I had no idea."

"Fussy fussy fussy," Jack taunted, retreating to the bathroom. One time, after sleeping over, Jack made coffee in the morning. It was so disgusting that Ianto banned Jack from ever making coffee for him ever again. He could almost believe he did it on purpose to guarantee he never had to make coffee for him again, but Ianto couldn't prove that.

He finished his toast in three bites, and gulped down the rest of the tea as he heard his shower come on. It was funny how a little food could make you feel better sometimes, but it did. His fogginess was fading away as well. Had he really been unnerved by a dream? He could hardly imagine that now.

From the bathroom, he heard Jack shout, "Well, are you joining me or what?"

Ianto rolled his eyes, but he couldn't help but smile. "Who's the horny teddy bear now?" Ianto replied, and found himself unable to smother a laugh. That actually was a pretty funny mental image, even if it didn't precisely fit Jack. He was a lot of things, but not really cuddly.

As Ianto got up and moved to the bathroom, he figured he really wouldn't want that anyways.

* * *

It was a sunny day, but more bright than warm. The chill of autumn was in the air, and Ianto knew soon it would be pretty wet and miserable. But not now, which is why he decided to walk.

Well, that and Jack had taken the SUV, which was the only transport he had since his car was still in the lot close to the Welsh Tourism Information Center, which was the surface cover for Torchwood's headquarters. Perhaps if there was a chance he might get injured and land in hospital, he should insist they all take separate cars.

Not that it ultimately mattered. The fresh air was kind of nice, the sunlight on his face kind of invigorating. Even his shoulder didn't seem to hurt as much. Lucky there was a small corner shop just two blocks from his flat. It was tiny, therefore didn't have a wide selection of things, but it had the basics, and he was rather fond of Mr. Tseng, the dotty old man who owned and ran the place. They were slowly but surely being put out of business by a much more expansive and flash supermarket six blocks further on. It was sad, but he also knew it was the way of commerce. Still, he liked to give him business where he could.

The breeze came up, the cold slicing into his cheeks, and he hunched deeper into his jacket as he walked up the street. He probably should have worn a heavier coat. Since he wasn't going into work yet, he just threw on a t-shirt and jeans, and grabbed his leather jacket out of the back of his closet. He was so accustomed to wearing suits all the time he actually felt funny, almost like he was skipping school or something. It was kind of fun.

He was several meters away from Tseng's shop when he heard, faint and eerie, a gossamer voice like a cobweb: _"Help us". _

Ianto stopped and turned, eyes searching the street. He was looking for anything abnormal, on the sidewalk or on the street, but he saw nothing but people and cars, all aggressively average. There were several people talking on mobiles, and a guy with a ring through his nose like a bull walked by listening to his iPod at a deafening level. Tires hissed on the macadam as cars drove by, and Ianto wondered if that was what he thought he heard, or if he simply misheard a snatch of someone's phone conversation. That must have been it.

He looked around for nearly a full minute, scanning everything, getting funny looks from people who were paying attention. But nothing seemed odd, no one seemed to need help or be asking for it, so he walked on. He'd almost forgotten about the nightmare. Why did it come back now?

He was still pondering this when he reached Tseng's shop. He was just outside the door, on the verge of opening it, when he saw the reflection in the glass. Someone was standing across the street, someone at the corner opposite him, and they were blatantly staring at him with a slightly drunken, yet somewhat predatory grin on their face.

Ianto felt a sudden shiver down his spine, a frisson of irrational fear. It was not a "hot guy" stare or even a "fucking weirdo" stare – it was one of recognition, amusement, and just a bit of disdain. He had a feeling this man knew him. Not personally – he knew he was Torchwood. How?

He was a bland everyman, a doughy guy with about twenty extra pounds on his frame, crammed in the dark slacks, dark suit coat, and dark tie of a mid-level office drone. He carried a battered brown leather briefcase, and Ianto found his eyes drawn to it, scudding away from his curiously vacant face. What was in the case? He had a cold feeling in his stomach that maybe he didn't want to know.

He didn't have his gun. It was a walk to the corner store in broad daylight – why would he carry a gun? Besides, he could fight. He would never claim hand to hand combat was a specialty of his, but he'd been in lots of scraps, and his average was probably better than normal. He wasn't afraid of walking around. Now he wondered if he should rethink that policy.

He turned to face the man as he started walking across the street, against the lights. The man was still too far away to hear, but Ianto could see his mouth, read his lips as he said, "Help us." He then stopped in the middle of the crosswalk, and his weirdly aggressive smile became broader, a rictus grin that threatened to split his face in two. "Find us," he said.

A horn blared, and a lorry came barreling down the street, running the man down with a scream of tires and a crunch of metal.


	3. Chapter 3

3

Here she had been thinking it just the other night, and here it was: Ianto in normal clothes. Would she recognize him?

Gwen was pleasantly surprised to discover that she did. Although he was about six inches taller than PC Andy, and that helped a lot.

Her hangover wasn't so bad. Mega-doses of aspirin and a coffee strong enough to power a Vespa had made her feel almost Human, and she could just about believe that she hadn't had one too many last night. Okay, three too many. Four? Last night was pretty much a blur ... thank god. Some evenings were just made for Retcon pills.

She flashed her ID at a couple of cops working a cordon, and slipped passed it easily. She could hear Andy being argumentative before she was within five meters of them. Because Ianto was facing the street, Andy saw her first, and appealed to her. "Gwen, please tell me how a man getting hit by a lorry is one of your spooky dos," he pleaded, exasperated.

She shrugged, and gave him what she hoped was a sympathetic smile. "Sorry Andy. This is a Torchwood crime scene."

He rolled his eyes and threw up his hands, as if appealing to someone perched up in the clouds. "Good lord, everything's a Torchwood scene." He walked away shaking his head, muttering, "Save me from bloody Torchwood."

As soon as Andy was out of range, still muttering to himself, she turned to Ianto and asked, "How is this a Torchwood scene exactly?"

When Ianto called her this morning, she wasn't sure she followed him. He told her there was a car accident right in front of him, and it wasn't right, so he needed some Torchwood back up before the cops took over the scene. Jack was out of the city, and while he'd called him, he wouldn't be able to get back to the Hub for at least an hour. She told him she'd be there right away.

Well, here she was, but she still wasn't sure what was going on. Someone was hit by a truck, and Ianto thought there was something wrong with it – that's all she had.

The story he told her hardly made things clearer. "Okay," she said, considering Ianto's story. "You've never seen him before, and you're sure he was talking to you? You're sure you heard him?"

Ianto nodded earnestly. "I know how it sounds. Imagine how it must have been for me to live through it."

She could only nod. No, it didn't sound plausible, but she'd learned that didn't mean it couldn't or didn't happen. It only meant it sounded weird.

Using the authority of Torchwood, they commandeered the ambulance that had come far too late to help the run down man, and used it to take the body back to the Hub. They took the body inside, and let the crabby ambulance techs take the vehicle away.

Once inside the cold sterility of the autopsy room, she got her first glimpse of the victim. He looked, just as Ianto had said, extremely average; unremarkable in every aspect, save for the blood, and the fact that broken bones were now sticking out of his chest, leg, arm, and face. He hadn't just been hit by the truck – he'd been pulverized by it. It had been speeding, and was large enough that it hadn't come to a stop until almost a minute after the driver had stomped the brakes. His shirt had probably once been white; it was now red, almost black in some places.

Police had already identified him as Harold Dorsey, and Ianto was on the computer, looking for information on him. It didn't take long. "Harold Arthur Dorsey," Ianto read. "Born June 18th, 1958, in Portsmouth. Parents were a greengrocer and a house wife. Mother died of cancer in '72, father died of a heart attack in '85, only sister, Susan, is an elementary school teacher in Glasgow. Harold was married once, to a Theresa Smith, but they divorced ten years ago. She now lives with their daughter in Leeds and has recently remarried. Daughter Monica is fifteen -"

"Can you tell me what he had for breakfast?" she asked sarcastically.

"Probably. Give me a minute."

"That's okay. It's probably not important." She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and started searching his pockets. It was difficult, not only because his pockets were sticky and wet with blood, but because of the smell coming from him. It was mostly blood, but not all; death had an awful smell, and he reeked of it.

She found nothing unusual: keys, lint, change, a half eaten roll of tablet antacids, a business card. "He works for the advertising firm of Gladstone Roberts."

"Yes. How did you know?"

"He's carrying a copy of his own business card."

"That was my next guess."

Although she sensed she was being set up, she asked, "What was your first?"

"Tattooed on his ass."

She laughed, and said, "You asshole. Making me laugh over a dead body."

"Gladstone Roberts have done worse. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility."

It took her a moment, but she supposed he had a point. She vaguely recalled that that was the firm that got in trouble over an ad campaign that some had said was racist, and then got sued by a former employee who accused a high level manager of sexual harassment. The suit was settled out of court, but that was all she knew about it. She was kind of surprised they were still in business, but there was no such thing as bad publicity, right?

Despite the minutia of his life that Ianto was able to dig up, there was nothing remarkable or strange about Harold Dorsey. In fact, he was so astoundingly unremarkable that it was almost remarkable.

Neither she nor Ianto was qualified to do an autopsy, nor did they have the desire to do one, so she broke into Owen's and Toshiko's wide array of scanners. From what she could tell, he was Human and very dead; the scanners seemed to confirm that the truck had done a lot of damage. It was actually hard to say what killed him, as there was a wide variety of choices. There was no sign of alien life, technology, or intervention.

"You said he was carrying a briefcase?" she asked.

"Yeah. Apparently it was thrown when he was hit, and the police figured wherever it landed, it was picked up and taken away."

That made Gwen pause. "Someone stole a dead man's briefcase?"

Ianto nodded, scowling. "Well, he had no further use for it."

"I suppose not." Even though she'd been police for many years, the callousness of some people still surprised her. Would it ever occur to her, in any circumstance, to steal something from a man just run down in the street? That was evil.

If there had been anything alien in that briefcase, it was now somewhere in Cardiff, unchecked. That didn't sound promising at all.

Harold lived in one of those new condos downtown, and with no other leads to follow, she and Ianto decided to head out there, see if he left any clues behind that might be helpful.

Cardiff, like so many big cities, was often being renovated somewhere, in some section or another, and whether you saw it as urban renewal, gentrification, or the death of a city's history depended on who you were and where you were on the food chain. The person who owned the soon to be opened Starbucks saw it differently than the sixty year old pensioner who'd just been "relocated" to make room for it.

The condo Harold lived in had the rather grand name of Bayview Towers, and perhaps it had a view of the Bay, but it looked like an office building that someone had slapped terraces on in some misguided effort to make it appear friendly. The windows were mirrored glass, the building the same blocky tower shape as every other building on the street. In fact, it was one of the blocks in the five block radius that Ianto disparagingly referred to as "Clone Town", as each street seemed to look exactly like the other. Gwen could understand the comfort to be found in uniformity, but it was kind of bizarre.

Harold once again went out of his way to prove he was aggressively average. His condo showed signs of having a cleaning service come in and keep everything tidy (and Gwen found a magnet for the Happy Maids service on his fridge, so that confirmed that), and his furniture had all the well appointed cleanliness of a sofa set in a furniture showroom. The only signs of the place being lived in was a copy of this morning's Western Mail folded up on the coffee table and a dirty coffee mug in the sink.

"Is this striking you as weird?" Ianto asked her, once their casual exploration had carried them to his bedroom and bathroom. She took the bedroom and left Ianto the bathroom, because she'd found enough surprises in men's bathrooms to not want to deal with that if she absolutely didn't have to.

Harold's bed was roughly made, meaning he hastily straightened the bed and threw the coverlet over it, a rather homely green-grey thing that could only have been bought by a straight man with no taste and possible color blindness. One of the pillows still had the indent of a head in it, but the other was perfectly plump and undisturbed. "Well, maybe he was a control freak. Maybe he had, what do you call it, OCD? Obsessive compulsive? That might explain this."

"Maybe." He sounded dubious. "Have you seen a single picture of his daughter?"

What an excellent question. In fact, Harold didn't have any pictures at all; his walls were pristine, virgin white as freshly fallen snow, and she'd seen none displayed on any tables or windowsills. "No. That is strange."

Going through a nightstand, she finally found a small framed photo of a fourteen year old girl in a purple sundress, with straight, long brown hair and her father's somewhat unfortunate nose. "I found one, in a drawer. How are you doing?"

"He had an ulcer," he proclaimed. "He was taking Cytotec. He also may have had an anxiety disorder, as he has some Librium in his cabinet as well."

"And you know what these drugs are taken for how?"

"I know everything." He paused briefly. "And I used my PDA to Google them."

She shook her head. Sometimes his sense of humor was inappropriate in its placement, but she never didn't appreciate it. Someone had to try and keep things light amidst all the gloom.

She found a collection of receipts, some bills, but a quick glance revealed that everything seemed reasonable: he owed three thousand dollars on his credit card, but seemed to be paying it off every month. He didn't seem to spend too extravagantly. He had a closet full of suits, but they were off the rack, and not off the best rack either. He should have consulted Ianto.

She never found a porno stash, which she thought was odd, but maybe it was reverse sexism for her to expect to find one. Except had she ever personally known a man without one? Well, there was Sheree's boyfriend in college, he didn't have one, but then he turned out to be gay, so maybe he wasn't the best example.

"Can I ask you a personal question?" she asked, using her torch to light up the remote areas of Harold's closet. Nothing but shoes lined up forlornly on the carpet, waiting for a master who would never come home.

"Maybe."

"Do you have a porn collection? I mean, I don't need details, but don't most men have one?"

"In general, yes. You haven't found Harold's."

Not a question. "No."

"Well, I'm of a younger generation, so my porn collection is all online. He might not be of my generation, but maybe his is too."

Oh yes, internet porn – the number one reason that the internet remained as powerful as it was. With no porn, the web would probably collapse in a day.

Harold's computer was at a desk tucked into the far corner of the bedroom, and Ianto, done with searching the bathroom, decided to have a go at it. He wasn't Toshiko, but since he was in charge of the computer archive and database at Torchwood, along with remote surveillance and deletion, he was now the go to guy on computers.

She stood behind him and watched as he started scouring Harold's computer. He used a remote link to connect to the Hub's system, and one of the automated programs started galloping through Harold's hard drive, extracting and sifting the information, digesting it and excreting it as a real time feed that Ianto scanned through with the ease of an old pro. She read about half of it, but he was scrolling through it too fast for her to keep up. He was more accustomed to the shorthand and the codes, the dross that was of no interest at all.

"He has a very standard system, underclocked, a third of the memory isn't even in use. He had several tracking cookies, mostly for your usual ad sites, but one indicates he's visited a site that specializes in hot horny sluts. As opposed to ugly disinterested sluts, I suppose." He said, in his usual deadpan. "The last sites he visited online were for the Economist's home page and ... now this is strange."

"What?"

"He Googled about animal bites." With a couple of taps on the keyboard he brought up one of the last things displayed on Harold's computer, the Google page with links about animal bites, three highlighted – presumably the ones he clicked on. Ianto clicked on them in turn, but they were unable to tell them what specifically he was looking at. He clicked on the links to MedLine, to the NHS library, to the one on the BBC site. All covered the basics of Human and animal bites, their information varying in only the way it was presented. "He was bitten," Gwen said. "But by what?"

Ianto looked up at her. "By a Weevil?"

And there was the connection to him. But she shook her head. "Weevils don't stop at one bite. The only reason you were bit once is because you and Jack both emptied your guns into it. You know as well as I do it would have ripped your throat out otherwise." It would have been nice if the connection could have been that simple. It wouldn't have explained the voice asking for help, but it would have been a start. "Did you see anything in his file that suggested a recent hospital visit?"

"No."

"If he was just bitten by a Weevil, he'd need medical attention. That isn't something you can just slap a plaster on."

He sighed, shoulders slumping. "No, I guess not. Damn it, I thought we'd found something."

"It would've been nice. But since when have things ever been that simple?"

He saved all the information from Harold's computer to the program in the Hub, and they did a final sweep of the condo before they left. At least they had a new objective: find out if Harold had any bites on his body. If that was even possible considering the shape he was in.

They were just inside the Hub when they heard, "So why is there a guy who's been killed by a steamroller in the autopsy room?" Jack asked the question far too cheerfully, but that was typical of him.

They brought him up to speed on everything, and Gwen wondered if he would return the favor by bringing them up to speed on his mystery trip to Breton Beacon, but also typical of him, he didn't. Jack thought he would be able to scan for old bites, so they let him, but they'd barely gotten under way when an alert sounded.

Ianto got to the computer first, at Toshiko's former station. "9-9-9 calls coming in from the Waterfront Cafe," he reported, and played some of the more recent ones. They were all brief and hard to understand, people reporting that "these things" were swarming inside the cafe, attacking people, voices broken by panic and static. Some people called them big weird insects, others some kind of animal or bird. Ianto called up some CCTV footage outside the cafe, and advancing through the frames, they saw, very briefly, something flit by the window inside the glorified diner. "Enhance that," Jack said.

He did. It gave them a slightly blurred still frame of something about the size of your average bat, but with gossamer, twinned wings like you might find on a dragonfly. They had cylindrical striped bodies topped by a big round head that appeared to be almost all teeth. They may have had several slender legs down their body, although the one in this still ... was it holding a fork?

Jack took in a sharp breath. "Son of a bitch. Koslovains."

"What are Koslovains?" she asked, sure she'd regret it.

"They're genetically engineered battle parasites."

Even Ianto looked disbelieving at that statement. "Battle parasites? You mean like angry tapeworms?"

"Worse. They're naturally occurring parasites on the homeworld of the Slovai, but the Slovai altered them to be weapons used against their enemies. They're usually released in advance of a Slovai invasion. They're nasty as hell."

"The Waterfront Cafe's about to be invaded?" she wondered. In other circumstances, that might be funny.

"I doubt it. Let's hope not. The Slovai are eight foot tall lizard men who eat the skin of their enemies." Jack sprinted off to the weapons locker, shouting, "Come on, we need to lock and load."

She and Ianto shared a concerned look before they followed him. Sometimes she was sure Jack just made this stuff up. But part of her was afraid that not only was he not, but that he was actually sparing them the worst.

Why couldn't extra-terrestrials be friendly and cuddly? Was that too much to ask?

* * *

They beat the police there, which was only partially luck. Jack called in and said that Torchwood would be taking care of the problem. It was impossible to hear the police response, but Jack chuckled in that offhand, amused way that he did when someone cussed him up and down. Ianto once asked him why he did that, and Jack just half shrugged and said, "I think it's funny." Maybe once you got to a certain age, being called a motherfucking asshole lost all of its sting, no matter who was calling you that.

Usually you had to tell the crowds of bystanders to clear the area, natural human curiosity driving them in to rubberneck, but not this time. The street in front and surrounding the cafe, which sat all alone near a disused pier, was eerily empty, and he felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck as they got out of the SUV and approached the weatherbeaten storefront. It was quiet too, all street noises two or three blocks off, just another detail of wrongness. Jack approached the front door, with him and Gwen flanking him on either side, their weapons out and ready. They had guns, but Jack had an odd weapon that basically looked like a metal can with a long nozzle. On the way over, he briefed them that they were to go ahead and kill the Koslovains, as they had nothing in the way of higher intelligence; what intelligence they did manifest was programmed into them by the Slovai, and was devoted only to hurting or destroying their targets. They also only had a fifty hour lifespan, which was how Slovai could "soften" an area with them but not have to deal with the little buggers themselves. Gwen took to calling them "suicide gnats", which was as good a description as any.

Jack glanced at them, silently confirming that they were ready, and at their nods, he kicked open the cafe's door, and shouted, "Koslovains -" And another word, a word Ianto had never heard before, one that wasn't English. Or Spanish, or Japanese, or Welsh, or French. Was that an alien word? Did Jack speak Slovai?

Because suddenly the bat sized creatures inside the small greasy spoon rose up in a wave, becoming a hovering swarm that seemed to fill half the room and hid a majority of the ceiling. It was like they were responding to a command, dogs told to heel. For a moment they just hovered there, their wings beating so fast they were little more than a blur and a high pitched hum, and he and Gwen got a good look at the unreal things.

Their bodies were maybe the length of his hand, perhaps a few centimeters longer, but thinner, growing from a bulbous head that was nearly all mouth to a whip thin tail, with ten slender legs (arms?) running from thorax to abdomen. They were green and black striped or blue and black striped, although there were a couple of yellow and blue striped ones near the back. Eyes scudding over them, he counted maybe twenty, twenty five.

And that's when the smell hit him.

It was a normal diner smell of grilling fat and fried eggs, strong coffee and weak tea, but it was the nauseating undertone to an overwhelming smell of blood. Glancing around, he saw there weren't many people left in the diner, but those left behind were most likely dead. A man was slumped in a booth, face down on a table painted red with blood, a fork sticking up out of the back of his neck. A woman in a waitress uniform was laying sprawled on the floor at the end of the counter, a piece of silverware sticking out of a bloody eye socket. There were three other bodies, and they too had silverware sticking out of them somewhere, as well as tiny bloody holes that must have been Koslovain bites. So they bit and possibly stung (their tails did come to points), but they also used tools to kill people? Maybe it was programmed knowledge, but it was incredibly bloody, cruel knowledge.

The Koslovains made a noise. It was almost like the voice someone might give a cartoon pixie, only it was so small it was barely audible, and if it was speaking a language, it was one that he didn't recognize in any respect. Maybe it was nothing more than a growl as they collectively realized the order was not given by a Slovai.

Like a flock of pigeons coming in for a landing, they swarmed them en masse.


	4. Chapter 4

4

As the Koslovains swooped in, Jack fired up his weapon. Literally. "How about some fire, scarecrow," he said, as flames jumped from the barrel of the miniature flamethrower. For such a small thing, the flame was huge and blue-white, so hot that Ianto could feel the heat even from nearly a meter away.

Jack stepped forward and fanned the flame back and forth, catching several of the Koslovains at once, almost as many as a dozen. Both he and Gwen had crouched down behind him, and were shooting at the remaining ones; there was no real aiming, it was just random shooting at a rapid pace, hoping against hope for a lucky strike.

In one sense, they were lucky - just nicking a wing could send them in a death spiral towards the floor. They were deadly, yes, but their wings were fragile, and probably unaccustomed to Earth's gravity and general lack of humidity. (Jack had said something about them liking heavy humidity, but of course it was just as they arrived and seconds before they got out of the SUV. He always did things like that - dropping bombs of information on them seconds before he was out the door. He probably thought it was funny.)

"You know quoting the Wizard of Oz is totally gay," Ianto pointed out, as a Koslovain dived for his face. He ducked aside, but he felt the scrape of its stinger along his jaw line. He slapped out in reflex, hitting it with the back of his hand, and it hit the floor, twisting around to get back to its feet and launch itself at him again. He turned the gun on it and shot it at almost point blank range. It exploded into a purplish-black goo, that was honestly extremely disgusting. Combined with the awful smell of burnt bugs, it was nearly enough to make you lose your lunch. But if the bodies and smell of blood hadn't done it, nothing would.

Jack just snickered at his comment, like he thought he would. Gwen yelped as one bit her on the arm, but she slapped it off and immediately squashed it with the butt of her gun.

With the flamethrower and the bullets, it was actually short work with the Koslovains. Obviously they weren't smart, as they kept trying to attack them, flying straight into the flames to do it. They had to stamp out a couple of smoldering ones before they caught the café on fire, although Jack had impressive flame control and managed not to set anything else on fire. Had he used a flamethrower before? Wow - did he doubt it? He'd probably used a bleeding death ray, perhaps even a death star for all they knew.

They had no choice but to turn over the crime scene clean up to the police. Families would have to be notified, bodies retrieved, people mourned. As to the why of it, it'd have to be passed off as some sort of robbery gone wrong, as there was no way they could say a bunch of battle parasites got lost in the Rift and somehow ended up in the café, which they thought was where they were supposed to be. Even if they told the families that, they'd chuck them out for being complete loonies.

Ianto was ashamed to discover he was the only one injured again. The one that bit Gwen was unable to get through her coat sleeve before she ripped it off. Okay, his injury was just a minor cut on his jaw, little more than a paper cut, but Jack still looked at it and wiped blood from his jaw with his thumb. "At least you weren't stung."

"What would have happened if I was stung?"

"Depends on the kind. A sting from a male just hurts; a sting from a female can paralyze you, or introduce potentially lethal bacteria into your bloodstream, depending on whether it's an egg layer or a drone."

"Lovely."

As soon as they left the café, he took a deep breath of fresh air. Okay, it wasn't that fresh, but compared to the air inside the diner it was as fresh as any he'd ever breathed. It was nice for exactly two seconds, when Gwen exclaimed, "What the hell ..?"

Ianto looked around and followed her gaze to the SUV, which was exactly where he parked it, but then he saw the paint discoloring the hood. No, not paint; yellow marker ink vivid on the black hood, spelling out _'I remember, Jack. Do you?' _

"I don't suppose this could be an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend," Gwen said, looking around, hand instinctively going for her holstered gun. The streets were still eerily empty.

"Or both," Ianto added, looking immediately towards the CCTV camera. "Damn it."

"What now?" Jack asked, but followed his gaze and saw it for himself. The camera was askew, pointed towards the roof of the diner. It was unlikely there'd be any footage that would show them who was responsible. "Kinda figured that."

If there was anyone watching them, they weren't showing themselves, nor were they making any aggressive moves. After several seconds, both Gwen and Ianto decided there was no immediate threat, if only because clearly Jack didn't think there was one at all. He was just looking down at the hood, trying to think of what this could be referring to. "So the attack on the café was deliberate," he said after a moment. "Someone wanted to send me a message."

"And what message would that be?" Gwen asked. "Besides 'remember'."

He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, but a muscle worked in his jaw. He was still projecting his usual mix of confidence and nonchalance, but Ianto saw little signs of tensions slowly overtaking him. If you were with him long enough, you began to notice what poker players would call his "tells". Everyone had them, it was just Jack's were subtler than most. "I have no idea." He paused and glanced back at the café. "But I better remember fast."

That probably went without saying.

Ianto checked anyways, but no, the CCTV footage outside the café cut dramatically to the roof shortly after their arrival, suggesting someone had been hidden and waiting for them. It bothered him that they could have overlooked someone so easily, but to be fair, they were focused on the café and the Koslovains within. Which was surely the point.

As soon as they returned to Torchwood, Gwen was on the phone with the police, Ianto went to the computer to see if he could call up CCTV footage, and Jack retreated into his office. To brood, but mainly to think. Ianto tapped into all the CCTV cameras around the Waterfront Café's general area, but the café had been situated rather uniquely, so it only had the one camera covering both sides of the street. There were no alternate angles to view, which the person who arranged this must have known. If they could somehow get themselves a swarm of Koslovains, they could surely find a good camera dead zone.

He then arranged for the SUV to be repainted - there was no way that ink was coming off - and after giving Jack a couple more minutes, he went up to his office. He was sitting behind his desk, elbows tented on the blotter, chin propped up in his hands, staring at nothing. He was so lost in thought that he didn't react to his entrance at all, and Ianto considered waiving his hand in front of his face when Jack's eyes moved, fixing on him. "I know - there's no footage at all."

"Yes, but that's not why I'm here."

"The SUV needs to be repainted."

He frowned at him. "Can you stop that for a moment?"

Jack sat back in his chair and sighed. "No. You're going to ask me if I was ever involved in something with Koslovains, and the answer to that is no. I knew of them from training exercises; I've never actually physically encountered them in a real world scenario."

"Training exercises," Ianto echoed, chewing that over. "You mean in the Time Agency thing."

He dipped his head. Jack didn't talk about the Time Agency, nor did he talk about his "friend" Captain John, and he was actually good with that. He wasn't sure he wanted to know about all of Jack's previous relationships, as he was sure he'd be too horrified to ever sleep with him again. The Time Agency interested him, but even if he could get Jack to talk about it, he'd never know what was true, what was exaggeration, and what was fact. If any of it.

"Could this be them again? Someone in it with a grudge against you?"

He scoffed faintly. "Besides John? In theory, yeah. You may find this surprising, but not everyone liked me."

"Really? I can't possibly imagine."

Jack smirked briefly at his sarcasm, but it collapsed quickly. "I just think that if they still had access to Time Agency resources, the attack would be more direct and deliberate."

"Like John?"

"Like John, or much worse. Gathering Koslovains and setting them loose on a diner just so they can graffiti my car? That's insane."

"Again, like John?"

Jack's blue eyed gaze became sharp, although there was a tiny bit of amusement hidden in their depths. "Jealousy is sexy on you, but now is really not the time."

"I could never be jealous of someone who chooses to dress like Adam Ant." He sighed and leaned forward, putting his hands on the desk. "What I was thinking is maybe you've walked into a similar situation before. Maybe that's what the remember meant."

Confusion briefly flashed across his face. The worst part was it made him look totally gorgeous. "I just told you I've never encountered Koslovains -"

"Not them specifically. I'm talking about the situation. Have you ever walked into a massacre before? Aside from Torchwood, where it admittedly happens all the time."

Jack's expression darkened as he contemplated something ugly. Ianto guessed it before he even spoke. "The problem is, it's happened too much for me to keep track of. It even happened where I grew up." He paused, grimacing as if just admitting that brought a bad taste to his mouth. "I've lived through a lot of things that weren't pretty. I need more clues, more specific details, before I can narrow it down."

He sighed, wishing he would tell him about it, and then again, wondering if maybe it was better he didn't. "You spoke Slovai. It couldn't be connected to them, could it?"

"No. They're very xenophobic, and the Treaty of Aughorn keeps them out of this galactic arm."

The treaty of what now? "Treaties are broken all the time."

"Yes, but this one was forged by a Time Lord, and the one time they broke it, the outcome wasn't pretty. The one thing the Slovai do respect is Time Lords."

Ianto stared at him quizzically. "Time Lords?"

"Unusual race. They travel space and time, death is meaningless, smarter than everyone, yada yada yada. Cute though. I'll give them that. Born heartbreakers to a man."

"You're making this up, aren't you?"

He chuckled, a genuine grin cracking his grim visage. "No. I know it sounds like it, but the stranger a thing is, the more likely it is to be true. First thing I learned in the Time Agency."

They heard Gwen pounding up the steps before the office door opened, and she said quickly, "You'd better come see this." She glanced at them both before darting back down the stairs, and they followed.

She stopped in front of the computer Ianto had been using to cycle through the CCTV cameras around the Waterfront Café. "I just looked over at it while I was arguing with Andy on the phone, and I saw this. Wait for it …"

Views of various streets and a car park flashed on the screen, staying for several seconds before moving on to another camera. There was one camera that seemed to be looking into Cardiff Bay, and it was that view, of an empty pier and the placid, cold water, that also showed, just off to the right side, almost out of camera range, a … thing. Ianto thought maybe it was a boat at first, a canoe, but who canoed around Cardiff Bay? And then there was the fact that it was empty, and bent in the middle and partially came out of the water before the view cycled back to the car park. "Was that a dinosaur?" Ianto exclaimed, quickly working the keyboard to bring it back to just the view of the camera overlooking the water.

"I thought it was a giant squid," Jack admitted.

"I thought maybe the Loch Ness Monster got relocated," Gwen said.

"Oh no, Nessie was just a Quorloxoil that got kicked off the homeworld for tax evasion," Jack said offhandedly. "Eventually it was convinced to leave. It lives in a warmer area now, Gulf of Mexico, where the water's too vast for it to attract any attention at all. It's not crazy about the salt, though. Still, it loves tequila, so it's all worked out."

"Oh, go on you, sell it to the tourists," Gwen said, clearly not buying it. Ianto was torn: it sounded like bullshit, and yet, just had enough unbelievable details in it to possibly be true. But, again, it sounded like utter pants, Jack's idea of a laugh.

Ianto brought the view back, but now there was nothing but water. He quickly switched to other cameras at other vantage points around the Bay, and found a choice one.

"Holy shit," Gwen exclaimed first, speaking for all of them. "What is that thing?"

It was as round and bulbous as an orange, only with a circumference of perhaps twenty meters across, and had a single huge eye in the center of its body, as big as a satellite dish, with at least two different nictitating membranes that they watched open and close as it seemed to float in the Bay. It had ten tentacles, maybe thirty meters long and half as wide, and it was colored a sort of sulfurous green, like you might find on a decomposing body.

"Oh, goddamn it," Jack cursed. "I told Tamsin that thing had spawned."

"Want to fill us in?" Ianto asked. What he didn't say was he knew exactly who Tamsin was: Tamsin Murray, who worked in Torchwood Cardiff along with Jack until late 1999, the medical officer. She was mysteriously killed, along with everyone else who worked at Torchwood Cardiff at that time, aside from Jack. That file was classified, but from what Ianto had heard while working at Torchwood London was an alien artifact had driven the team leader insane, and in a fit of homicidal violence, he wiped out everyone else, except Jack, who was out on assignment at the time. Jack would never talk about it, which pretty much confirmed the story. Sometimes looking at all the things he'd locked away in the special vault, the one where dangerous artifacts were hidden away, he wondered if the artifact that drove the previous team leader insane was in here, or if Jack destroyed it. Having been through the inventory list, he'd decided Jack had personally dealt with it, or hid it somewhere and kept it off the books. Tamsin, if he remembered her file photo correctly, was pretty. He idly wondered if Jack had turned his charm on her.

"That's a Dhelian water sprite."

"That colossal bugger is not a sprite," Gwen insisted.

"Hey, that's what the Dhelians call 'em; I didn't name 'em."

"So what does it do?"

"Basically it's a bottom feeder, it eats the remains of other creatures. It's capable of asexually reproducing, but the eggs take about ten years Earth time to hatch, so to speak. "

"You're saying this is a baby?" Ianto replied. It didn't look to be doing anything but sitting in the middle of the Bay, like it was having a relaxing bath. If it knew how polluted the Bay actually was, it wouldn't be so relaxed.

"Yep. Dhelia is basically an ocean world; only two percent of it is solid ground. The rest is water, water everywhere. And full of big bastards like this."

"Do I want to know how big it will get once it's an adult?" he wondered.

"Probably not."

"Are they as harmless as they sound?" Gwen asked hopefully.

As if on cue, the water sprite was seen to have something in one of its tentacles. The camera resolution wasn't great, but after several moment, just before it opened its slit like maw and revealed several rows of small (for its size) icicle shaped teeth, they realized what they were looking at. "That's a dog," Gwen gasped.

"And there's the man who was walking it," Ianto added, as the man and his dog both disappeared down the creature's gullet.

"They're perfectly harmless unless there's not enough food, then it eats everything in sight," Jack explained, and Ianto glanced over his shoulder as Jack and Gwen headed towards what was essentially Torchwood's airlock, the entrance to the outside world. "Ianto, set off any city alarm you can find and blast it at the Bay."

"The reason?" he asked.

"Loud, high frequency noises confuse the sprites out of water, so it should keep it where it is until we can get there."

"We're not taking this out with guns," Gwen told him.

Jack nodded in agreement. "That's what the Semtex's for."

The wheeled door rolled aside, and they were gone before Ianto could say anything else. Left behind again. He would have been disappointed if it wasn't so typical. But at least this time he had more to do than tidy up the place.

It wasn't difficult to get into the city's computers, mainly because they already had functioning "back doors" into all the systems, and it was just a case of knowing where it was you wanted to go. There was still a system of loudspeakers, but air raid sirens were no longer available, which was a damn shame. Still, he found an emergency siren and set it off, and while he couldn't hear it here - too far away, and also underground - the way the water sprite seemed to cringe (it shrank lower in the water), he figured it was working. He glanced at a secondary screen, called up the GPS signal of the secondary SUV, which they were using now that the other had to be repainted. It was easy to figure out what route they'd be taking to the Bay, so he got into the city's transportation computer network, and made sure the lights would all be green for them the entire way. After the second one, Jack came over the comm and said, "Ianto, I love you."

"All in a day's work," he answered smoothly, but he was grinning. It was nice to be acknowledged every now and again.

"He doesn't actually mean it," a voice said. A whispery, quiet voice, like the one he'd heard on the street earlier today - the one Harold Dorsey had inexplicably used. "He usually doesn't mean anything he says."

He felt a cold shock of fear down his spine, and turned swiftly, pulling his gun and aiming it in the direction of the autopsy room. As soon as he saw no one there, he scanned the room, moving his gun to various quadrants, finger tensed and ready on the trigger.

Nothing. He was seemingly alone in the Hub. But he knew he wasn't; the feeling of it crawled up his spine, and came trickling down in cold sweat. "Who are you?" he asked in a harsh whisper, keeping his gun raised and ready as he made his way to the autopsy room. "Are you after Jack?"

No answer. Ianto made it to the edge of the room and looked inside, to see Harold's body laid out on the autopsy table, in the exact same position as they had left it earlier. The sheet was pulled up half way over his body, and blood had soaked into it in certain areas, making it look polka dotted with gore.

"How are you doing this?" he asked, watching Harold's corpse carefully. No answer. Was he going crazy?

He backed up to the nearest console, and ran a scan for life signs in the Hub. It was just him and the Weevil in the Vault (Brenda). "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?" the voice asked.

He glanced around, not expecting to see anyone, and he wasn't disappointed. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

"You don't look well," the voice said. "Are you sick?"

"What are you -" But he soon realized he didn't feel well. His tie felt too tight around his neck, and he was sweltering hot, like the usually drafty Hub had suddenly become a sauna. He yanked the knot of his tie while the room seemed to tilt on its axis, and he dropped to his knees, so dizzy he felt like he was on a carnival ride. "What are you doing to me?" he gasped, as the gun dropped from his hand and clattered on the decking. He wanted to fight it, but he didn't know how. It was hard to fight when you didn't know how you were being attacked.

Ianto's last thought before he lost consciousness was wondering how a corpse could possibly be telepathic.


	5. Chapter 5

5

Jack knew something was wrong about two blocks away from the Bay.

How? He wasn't actually sure. It was just this feeling, a crawling sensation on the back of his neck that made his hairs stand on end and sent something akin to a shiver down his spine. He'd felt it before, most memorably entering a strangely quiescent space station only to find that half the crew had been murdered – either blasted, eaten, or both – while the other half must have fallen into the atmosphere of the gas giant below after being hulled along with the east end of the station. Spooky, nasty, a hell of a thing, made worse by the fact that he was on the lam from the Time Agency at the time and couldn't actually report it to anyone or follow it up without exposing himself (he was kind of wanted at the time – he probably still was on some worlds, come to think of it). He eventually got a back up generator going, and the automated systems took care of the rest, broadcasting a distress signal as he got back on board his ship and got the bloody hell out of there. He wondered if that was what the "remember" message was for, but no, from what he heard later on, a group of Lo'whenir cultists were responsible for the slaughter, and the main Lo'whenir government hunted them down and killed every single one of them. He had nothing to do with either them or the cultists. No offense to them at all, they could be very nice people, but there was something about sentient carnivorous plants that could be disconcerting, especially if you were having dinner with them.

Earth's gravity would be hard on them, and he was pretty sure they were one of those races that had no written language, mainly due to a lack of hands. How could they have written on the SUV? It would have taken them about eight minutes to worm their way from one side of the street to the other in this gravity; they all would have seen them. This didn't even take the problem of marker manipulation and learning to write English into the equation. So no, the Lo'whenir were straight out of contention. One down, a few thousand to go.

He started slowing down, easing up on the accelerator without being aware of it, and Gwen noticed. "What's wrong?"

He shook his head, grimacing at his own senseless feeling. "I dunno. Does something strike you as not right about this?"

She stared at him in mild disbelief. "There's a big one eyed squid in the bay eating people. Yes, quite a bit strikes me as not right about this."

"No. I mean ... I'm not sure what I mean."

"Clears that up," she replied, checking her gun. It was habit, as it was unlikely to be useful this time.

They could hear the emergency sirens blaring out across the bay, and as Jack swung the SUV around the corner, he suddenly realized what had bothered him, what he had noticed without realizing it: the sky. In the pictures of the bay back at the Hub, the sky was overcast, cloudy, maybe drizzling a little. Out here it was clear; cold, but as far from rainy as you could get. Now the Rift could cause weird and extremely localized weather patterns, but it wasn't the Rift that was active at the moment. And he could see for himself it was clear over the Bay, not a scrap of a cloud in the sky.

"Where the hell is it?" Gwen asked, and Jack barely needed to glance down to confirm it: the surface of the Bay was as smooth and glassy as a mirror, a silty blue-grey that had been darker in the video. "Did it duck under?"

Jack pulled over, but left the engine running. "No. It was the feed of an old video."

"What?"

"When the creature first appeared. I never saw the original footage, I was on the scene investigating unusual Rift activity, which was that thing coming through. Somebody looped the video in, dug it up out of the archives."

Gwen looked at him in wide eyed surprised. There was some doubt, but not a lot; he was used to some skepticism from her, but it was reflex by now. "Who could do that? Why?"

He shrugged, but tapped his comm. "Ianto, kill the siren. We've been conned." He waited a beat for a reply, but there wasn't one. "Ianto? Talk to me, big guy." More silence.

He exchanged a concerned look with Gwen, who tapped her comm and asked, "Ianto, can you hear me?"

Still nothing. Now his bad feeling was a certainty. Someone lured them out of Torchwood; someone figured they'd either get them all out, or there'd be only one left to deal with. Son of a bitch.

He threw the car into gear and reversed sharply, tires screeching on the pavement as he did a quick turn and started speeding back to the Hub.

He hated getting tricked. He hated imperiling team members even more.

Whoever was behind this had better start praying they weren't there when they arrived, or they'd be scraping him off the walls.

* * *

Not everything was destroyed with Torchwood London. Physically yes, most of it was demolished, but there were some things that couldn't be destroyed because they weren't actually at the location.

The back up database, for example. Most people in Torchwood knew it existed, but only people with a certain security clearance knew how to access it. Them, and a few of the lower level people who helped set it up.

Ianto wasn't in the tech department, he was just a lowly researcher, but he did help assemble files for the database, so he knew how to access it. Even from places where he shouldn't have been able to access it. A home computer, for instance. But since he was worried it might be traced back to him, he used a public library computer to access the database.

From accessing it, he figured out what he had to salvage from the wreckage to keep Lisa alive (although he didn't find any information that could have reversed the Cyberman process, though), but it was a stopgap. He needed to figure out his next move. Beyond drinking himself into oblivion or trying to kill himself, which he had done or contemplated. Lisa was still alive, so it fell to him to figure out some way to save her, no matter how good it felt when the cold barrel of Lisa's gun was pressed against his temple.

So, focus. He had to shove aside self-pity and self-loathing and just get on with it. If he wanted to save her, he had to get back into Torchwood. The problem was how.

He had never been anything special, never been noted for much of anything. He didn't try, though; why would he have tried? He wasn't an agent like Lisa had been, he wasn't involved in anything even remotely dangerous or glamorous. He was a desk jockey, just a desk jockey in an unusual place. He had Lisa and he was happy with that – he honestly didn't give a fuck about the job. He did what he had to do, but no more. He had no bad marks on his record, but no good ones either, and since he could be taken or left or easily replaced, chances were he'd have some difficulty getting back in. Especially since he pissed some people off when he remained missing for almost twenty four hours after the fall of Torchwood One, when all the survivors were supposed to be reporting in immediately. But hey, he had Lisa to take care of. He couldn't just drop her so he could report to any surviving supervisor. And then there was the fact that he ended up in a hospital himself, but that was just an irritation. He wasn't hurt that badly. It seemed like his body betrayed him, along with almost everything else.

First place he checked out was Torchwood Dublin. He'd heard Mairead O'Hanlon was a known eccentric, and he imagined he could charm her enough to get in the door, but logistically it was a problem – how the hell was he supposed to get Lisa across the water? It was do-able, but so risky he had to move it to the bottom of his short list, even though O'Hanlon was the most likely to let him in.

Torchwood Glasgow was a maybe. The leader there, Ewan Fletcher, was a fairly tough nut, but he was also a notorious alcoholic whose problem sometimes colored his ability to do his job. So if he just hung around the pub and bought him a couple of pints, he could probably get in. But how his notoriously strict second, Rajiv Jain, might judge him was an unknown. He might not be able to get past him, so it remained in the "maybe" column.

The last one probably held the most promise, but also held the most unknowns: Torchwood Cardiff. Ianto easily turned up basic files on O'Hanlon and Fletcher; he could turn up absolutely nothing on its leader, Jack Harkness (always given the title "Captain" for no obvious reason). All his files were classified; basically he could only confirm he existed, and was in charge of Torchwood Cardiff. That was it.

Thinking about it, he wasn't the only one who had tried to figure out what was up with Harkness. He recalled one of the Information supervisors talking to his supervisor as they walked past to the lifts. They were discussing why Harkness was left in charge of Cardiff when he seemed to have broken off all ties with headquarters, and his supervisor said it was because he still seemed to be getting the job done, and because he was their only known connection to the "doctor". Doctor who? No one knew. Well presumably someone knew, just not anyone with their security clearance.

On the plus side, he had no ties with HQ – Torchwood Cardiff was totally on its own. Presumably Harkness could find out he was unremarkable, but maybe he could pitch to him as a fellow outsider, someone abandoned by "regular" Torchwood. That might be the way forward. But without knowing anything about him, though, he had no idea what approach might be best. Tricky. But it was his hometown, even if he had no family left. It might be nice to be back in Cardiff. At least he knew the terrain.

There was something odd about his file photo, but Ianto had to go through them again before figuring it out. The photos of O'Hanlon and Fletcher were similar in the sense that they were businesslike, slightly grim photos, like all the security photos were. But Jack was grinning in his, in a sort of lopsided way, like he was snickering before the photo was taken. It could have meant either he was frivolous or cruel, depending on what he was snickering at.

He felt a bit of a twinge, as he was exactly the type of guy he went for: dark hair, strong jaw, the width of his shoulders seemed to indicate that he had a good sized chest. But he dismissed it summarily, much as he had men after Griffin. (Women were sadly right – men were generally assholes.) He'd have felt better about this if he had any idea what Harkness was like, what pitch he'd be most receptive to, but he had nothing, just rumors and redacted files where the most interesting bits had been removed.

Ianto decided he just had to pick one. Cardiff was closest, meaning that the transport would be easiest, and it was home anyways. He'd always promised to take Lisa there, but they just never got around to it. Now he could. If he couldn't find a way to convince Harkness to take him in, he'd go off to Glasgow, leaving Dublin as his last resort. So now he had a plan, and he could stop thinking about himself, could stop wallowing in self-pity and hopeless. He had a plan.

And he was going to save her even if it killed him.

* * *

They returned to the Hub to find a scene that was much better than Jack feared and also much worse.

He and Gwen went in guns first, ready to take on the first thing that moved, but the only things moving were the water dripping down from the central pillar and the gelatinous screensaver on the computer monitors. Ianto didn't respond to his name, but they discovered why once they inched into the Hub, trying impossibly to cover all angles at once.

Ianto was face down on the floor, his gun several inches away from his outstretched right hand. Jack said his name sharply, but that got the same result as before. He holstered his Webley and went to Ianto, turning him over and quickly scanning him for blood. "Is he all right?" Gwen asked, still trying to cover all the angles on her own.

"Yeah, I think so." At least he wasn't bleeding and was still breathing. He was unconscious, though, and that thing had come back again, the one where he gave off heat like a furnace. His skin was flushed, and sweat had made damp wisps of hair cling to his forehead. He gently patted Ianto on the cheek. "Ianto, come on. Time to wake up." He increased the strength of the pat, and was about to move on to what could be called a slap when Ianto jerked, a type of involuntary muscle movement that usually happened before someone fell asleep. But his eyes opened, wide and startled, and for a brief moment, Jack was fairly sure Ianto had no idea where he was. He even looked up at him like he wasn't sure who he was, but then knowledge seemed to flood back. "Harold," he said. "Harold Dorsey isn't dead."

Jack glanced briefly at Gwen, who immediately headed towards the autopsy room. "I know it sounds insane," Ianto continued, sitting up. "But he was talking to me again. He's dead, but he's not dead. I don't understand it."

"His body's still here," Gwen reported. "And he doesn't smell very good."

"He didn't move," he insisted. "He was speaking to me telepathically." Ianto paused briefly and scowled at his own words. "God, that sounds insane."

"No more than anything else," Jack assured him. "What did he say?"

He had to think about that a moment. He looked down at the floor, and seemed to notice his fallen gun. "I – I don't remember."

Gwen seemed momentarily satisfied that the three of them were alone, and went over to the workstation Ianto had been using, and with a click of a few keys, she cut the siren over the Bay. "Scan for life signs in the Hub," he ordered.

"I don't think it worked when I did it," Ianto said, and scrubbed a hand through his sweaty hair. "I feel funny."

"Only three Human life signs and one Weevil," she reported.

Ianto picked up his gun and holstered it, and Jack stood up, wondering what this all meant. How much of this made sense? From the way Harold died, it seemed almost like a suicide, like he wanted to die. And yet the last thing he said to Ianto was "Find us". A challenge? Maybe something veiled, such as "Find us or we find you". That didn't sound promising. Was there any alien life form he could think of that needed death as some kind of passage, some kind of transference?

Was that it? He could actually think of a couple that had unusual rites like that, ones who used physical death as a way – or at least an attempt – to transcend into some kind of "higher being". But none, to his knowledge, could pass for Human.

Unless something had changed.

Ianto stood up, but instantly stumbled, and Jack put a hand against his back to keep him from falling. He could feel heat coming through his jacket. "I think we'd better take you to the medical bay. You're sick."

"No I'm not," he protested, and then wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. "Or I wasn't before he made me sick."

"How did he make you sick?" Gwen asked.

Ianto thought about before he shook his head. "I've no idea."

Jack grabbed Ianto's arm and started hustling him towards the little used medical bay. "Gwen, scan for everything: psionic resonances, energy, hypersonic waves, radiation, everything Toshiko set up the sensors to handle. Let me know if anything comes up abnormal or unusual."

"Right."

Ianto stared at him in an odd, feverish way, his eyes as shiny as diamonds, but he didn't speak until they were in the medical bay. "You believe me," he finally said.

"Of course I do. You're not crazy. Do you think you are?"

Jack relaxed his grip and Ianto wandered to the end of a medical bed, sitting on its edge and sighing. The medical bay was a small room, just big enough to contain the six narrow beds it contained. The ward was originally built as part of a larger medical complex within Torchwood between the World Wars, as the slightly crumbling brickwork still attested to. But as medical technology began to catch up to various illnesses and worldwide pandemics seemed less and less likely (oh, they hardly knew how wrong they were ...), the bay was scaled back to a small room within Torchwood proper. There were other rooms, it could be expanded as necessary, but as long as Jack had been at Torchwood Cardiff it never had been. Owen had probably only been in here eight times during his entirety with Torchwood, and only a couple of times with an actual patient. Despite the sedate, low tech look of the place, sophisticated medical scanners were built into the walls, and hidden LCD display screens would come to life and show medical information on the patient in the bed. Other more unusual scans could be ordered up from a control panel on a narrow desk flush against the far wall. "I dunno. I'm beginning to think so. When I came to, I thought ..."

"Thought what?"

He huffed a breath through his nose, shaking his head. Sitting on the bed was enough for the medical scanner. Jack saw it was starting to display information on Ianto's current condition. His heart rate and blood pressure showed stress – no kidding – but the surprise was his body temperature: one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit. And rising? How was that possible? "I thought I was back ... I was in London. I thought I was back there then ... it wasn't a dream, it wasn't a memory. It was ... I was living it again. God, I'm thirsty. Is there any water around here?"

"Gwen, get in here," Jack shouted, as Ianto did something he didn't want him to do: he looked at the display screen. He saw his current stats.

The funny thing was, he didn't react at all. He just stared at it, and muttered something like, "Do I have pneumonia again?"

"Ianto, I think we're gonna hafta call in a doctor." Where the hell was Martha? Damn it, why did Unit have to have her on radio silence now? "In the meantime, we're gonna hafta put you into stasis. Your temperature's going up way too fast. I mean, sure, you're hot, but this is ridiculous." As if to prove the point, his temperature was already up to one hundred and five point eight. As an adult, he could stand higher temperatures, but his brain must have been starting to bake. He would start hallucinating, dehydrating, and it might trigger heat stroke; he could actually die of self-induced hyperthermia.

"I knew you were trouble right away," Ianto said. His voice had taken on an odd quality, as if he was speaking from very far away; his voice was fragile and watery. His skin was so flushed he almost looked sunburned. "Just from your photo. But I was so desperate I didn't care that you'd be the death of me. In fact, I think that's what I wanted. I wanted you to kill me -"

The medical scanner started beeping an alarm. One hundred and six point one degrees and rising. Jack went to Ianto and grabbed him by the shoulders. He was trying to make him look him in the eyes, but Ianto was gone. Conscious still, yes, but lost in a delusion. He hastily stripped off Ianto's suit coat, and saw that his shirt was so wet with sweat it was clinging to him like he'd just gone for a dip in the Bay. Did they even have time to get him into stasis? The process itself might kill Ianto, but he was holding out hope that once they got a proper doctor in here, they could bring him back. "Goddamn it, Harold," Jack snarled under his breath. "Let him go before I kill you again."

"What's -" Gwen began, but then took in a sharp breath. "Oh god. What's happening to him?"

"He's being baked from the inside out. We need to get him into stasis now."

"Jack, he won't survive it."

"I know that!" he snapped, briefly losing control of his temper. Damn it, rein it back; losing control now would not help Ianto. "I'll contact Torchwood HQ, get them to send us an experienced medical officer. They'll be able to revive him. It's the only chance he has right now."

Gwen had come over to help him, but Ianto, who had been limp as if melting, suddenly shoved Jack away with nearly superhuman strength. He collided with Gwen who yelped as they both went down and hit the floor.

"Killing is always your answer, isn't it Jack?" Ianto said, but it wasn't actually Ianto. It was generally his voice, but there was a curious flatness to it, as if he'd forgotten his Welsh accent.

The beeping had stopped, and Jack looked up to see why. Ianto was on his feet, tie askew, wet shirt open almost to mid-chest, his gun drawn and aimed down at him. No, scratch that – not aimed at him, aimed down at Gwen. But Ianto was giving him a tight, nasty smile, a razor blade smirk, his shiny eyes full of nothing but pure abject hate. It took a moment for Jack to realize why his eyes looked so strange. It was his pupils; they were so dilated that his irises were almost gone. "Who are you?" he asked. Of course it wasn't Ianto. It wasn't just the expression and the voice, it was the body language. Someone was wearing him like a cheap suit, like they weren't quite used to him yet. "What do you want?"

"As I was walking up the stair, I met a man who wasn't there," Ianto recited, nearly jeering. "He wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd stay away."

"What have you done to Ianto?" Gwen asked, giving Jack a quizzical look. She thought they should do something, but they were stuck. He was too far away to charge, and sure, Jack could go for his gun, but this bastard would shoot Gwen if he did. He wasn't aiming the gun at him because he knew Jack wouldn't care if he shot him.

"I just needed a vessel. Imagine how pleased I was to get one so near and dear to your heart, Jack. Although sleeping with you." He mock shuddered. "Felt sorry for this boy. I'm doing him a favor."

"You're killing him. Let him go! Whatever you want to do to me, do it already, you chickenshit coward!"

He grinned, all teeth and malevolence, an expression that didn't quite fit Ianto's face. "Oh no, Jack. You made my people suffer, and now I intend to return the favor."

And with that, the creature fired.


	6. Chapter 6

6

As he fired, Jack threw himself over Gwen, hoping the bullet didn't punch through him and go through her anyways. He was hoping it'd lodge in him, or at least passing through his body the bullet would shed enough momentum to be rendered harmless.

To say it hurt was an understatement. Jack really didn't get why he couldn't permanently die, but he could feel the pain of every pseudo-death anyways. It seemed intensely cruel, a sick joke. The bullet ripped through his back, deflating a lung before hitting his ribs and breaking some, but he felt no exit wound. His ribcage was just too much for it to go through, thankfully. Or not, since he was now struggling to breathe, and the pain knifed through his chest. His ribs had just healed, and now a new set were broken again. Damn it.

"You bastard, you just don't get it, do you," Ianto/Harold said, grabbing him by the hair and yanking him off Gwen, pulling him back.

"Sorry Ianto," he said, reaching up to grab Ianto's hand tangled in his hair, and for the split second he felt he had a measure of control, he jerked his head straight back, nailing Ianto in the groin. No matter how superhuman he was, he was in a Human body and that was a weak point.

Ianto let out a grunt of pain and involuntarily doubled over, as Jack dropped onto his back and kicked Ianto in the head. It sent him stumbling back, and he hit one of the beds, falling backwards over it. He landed with a thud on the floor on the opposite side.

"Don't move!" Gwen shouted, sounding very commanding and butch. She had the cop voice nailed. "Don't even think about it!" She had her gun out and trained on Ianto as she edged around the room. This gave Jack a moment to spit blood and take a few shallow breaths. He was healing, but not fast enough. It was still hard to breathe, and his entire chest ached.

Ianto jumped up to his feet, unfazed, and the look he gave Gwen was chilling. His eyes were pure evil, but he was chuckling, his mouth shaped somewhere between a smile and a sneer. "Go ahead and shoot, Officer Cooper. Kill him. I'll just move on to someone else. Maybe you."

Her eyes went wide in horror. Yes, they couldn't seriously hurt Ianto. If death of the host allowed this alien to switch to a new one, then they had to keep Ianto alive as long as possible, all beside the point that they wanted to keep Ianto alive, full stop.

Ianto – Harold; Jack didn't even know how to think of him, what name to ascribe him – used Gwen's moment of realization to reach out and wrench the gun from her hand before backhanding her across the face. Jack got to his feet and lunged, going for a full body tackle, but he didn't know if he made it or not, as Ianto shot him almost point blank in the face with Gwen's stolen gun.

* * *

Gwen was proud of herself for not screaming as blood exploded out of the back of Jack's head and painted the wall. She wanted to do, but she didn't.

Jack didn't permanently die, or at least so far he hadn't, so she always had to keep that in the front of her mind. But someone getting shot in the head was always an awful thing, especially when it was with your gun.

He hit the floor like a sack of weights as Ianto strode right by him, and at the doorway he paused and looked back at her, aiming her gun at her face. "Follow me, and you'll join him. Although I suppose it would be poetic justice. Jack would be so upset to come back and find your head popped like a balloon." Suddenly a strange look washed over Ianto's face; it was annoyance tinged with something else, and his lips briefly twitched, his eyes softening for as long as a blink. Did his hand shake? If so, it only lasted a second.

"Who are you?" she demanded, hoping to take advantage of that momentary imbalance. Was that what she initially thought it was? It was either a nervous tic, or for one brief second, Ianto almost regained control. He was still in there, and mentally she was shouting at him to fight.

He scowled evilly, and she knew whatever piece of Ianto almost came out was gone again. "He knows. See if he'll tell you he tried to commit genocide."

"What?"

But he said nothing, he disappeared from the doorway, and she heard him walking across the decking. For a moment she considered following him, taking Jack's gun and doing it, but could she shoot Ianto? To wound, but not to kill, and frankly she wasn't sure what would wound the thing inside him right now. She was counting on all the tracking devices Torchwood employees had to make him easy to find. Besides which, if he was really after Jack, he wasn't disappearing for good.

She wiped the blood from her split lip and crawled over to Jack, who was still face down on the floor, blood splattered on his jacket. The exit wound had closed, though, as far as she could tell.

It was about a minute before Jack gasped, his hands moving to press him up from the floor. "Oh god, I hate head wounds," he said, pushing himself up to a sitting position. He was healed, but still had blood on his face. Looking at her, he seemed to know what she was going to say. "He's gone."

She nodded. "But I think Ianto's still in there. He was considering shooting me, and he got unsteady for a moment."

Jack looked relieved. "Good. So if we can get Harold out of him, we'll get him back." He stood, and she did the same, resisting the urge to help him. He wouldn't want help.

She really didn't know how to say the other thing to him, there was no way of dancing around it, so she simply blurted out, "He said you tried to commit genocide."

Jack stared at her, a troubling look flashing through his eyes as he considered that. "Genocide? Unless he's a Dalek, that makes no sense at all." He wiped the blood off his face with his sleeve, and with a single deep breath seemed to switch gears. "Get on Tosh's computer. In a file marked Non-Euclidean Algorithms, you'll find a program named Cyclops. Plug Ianto's photo into it and let it run."

"What is it?"

"It's facial recognition software that taps into all the CCTV cameras in Cardiff. Wherever he is, we'll know."

"I thought that didn't work before."

"It didn't, that's why Tosh was working on a version two. I'm going to scan Harold, see if there was something we missed. Finding out how Harold came to inhabit him may give us away to get rid of him without killing Ianto."

She hoped so. She also hoped Jack wasn't lying to her, because, for the briefest second, she thought she saw a hint of panic in his eyes when she mentioned genocide.

Nah, couldn't have been.

* * *

Ianto was pretty sure he was dreaming. It was the only thing that made sense.

He was watching things happen in front of his eyes, but from a distance, like he was sitting too far back from a movie theater screen to see the fine details too clearly. Which might be why he suddenly found himself sitting in a theater, watching what was going on before his eyes projected on a large screen that seemed too far away.

What was the last thing he was doing? It was hard to remember. Wait – Harold was talking to him, right? Yes, he was, and then ... weird. He had nothing but a fleeting feeling of discomfort, of feeling incredibly sick and the world blurring and melting at the edges, like a watercolor left out in the rain. He felt dizzier than he ever had in his life, like he was falling in a landscape where the world shifted around him, spun in spiral.

And now here. That made no sense at all. He had been in Torchwood, and now he was in a movie theater he didn't recognize, with red velvet covered seats and a rectangular screen. He was the only person here, and in spite of the fact that it had an almost undefinable shabby air, he was sure he'd been the only person ever here.

The things going on up on the screen ... that couldn't be real. He was attacking Jack and Gwen. Why would he do that? He heard a voice speaking too, which was him and yet not him. He saw he was holding a gun, and yet none of it seemed real at all. Until he shot Jack.

Ianto let out a shocked yelp as blood splattered the wall and Jack hit the floor like a stone. He jumped out of his seat and looked for a way out of the theater, but throughout the flickering darkness, he saw nothing but solid walls. There was no way in or out of this theater.

But it wasn't really a theater, was it? He'd seen and experienced many strange things while working for Torchwood, so he couldn't say he was surprised more than he was irritated. He couldn't feel his body around him anymore; he felt mostly numb. He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate, tried to will the feeling back (if that was even possible), but nothing was happening. Except he heard himself – with a flat, hard, mocking voice – threatening to shoot Gwen. "No you will not!" he shouted, not bothering to hold back his anger. "You will not shoot her, you fucking bastard! Give me back my body, now! Whoever the hell you are, get out of my fucking head!"

He almost felt himself. For one second, he thought he could feel the blood pounding in his temples and the cold metal in his hand, but just as fast as he made these small victories, he lost them.

"You can't win, Human," a man said.

He spun on his heels, startled to no longer be alone, and found Harold standing in the aisle right behind him. But it wasn't really Harold, and he knew that intuitively – he was looking at the form the alien had adopted, one he decided to show Ianto, but it wasn't his true form. What was? Ianto glowered at him, wondering if he could actually hurt him. He bet not, but he wondered if maybe he could take him by surprise. "What do you want with me? Why are you after Jack?"

Harold gave him a small, cold smile, totally lacking anything approaching warmth. His eyes glittered in the half dark, and what he could see of them made him feel something akin to a chill. "You're nothing, boy, just a lucky circumstance. We were afraid those bloody Weevils would give the game away, but they seem no smarter than they were in the old asteroid mines. Neither does Jack."

He focused on the weirdest thing he said. He was a Torchwood officer, sort of; he would figure this out, and find some way to tell the others. "The Weevils? You caused the Weevils to go crazy?"

"Not intentionally. No, one of us ended up in a Weevil, and that's a hostile environment if there ever was one. The Weevils sensed us and lost their tiny little minds until they got rid of us. It's a mutual hatred; they're one of the few who can detect us, and one of the few that can resist us. Most can't. Why those bottom feeders do I have no idea. Dumb beasts."

The poor Weevils. He'd wanted to communicate with them, and in their own way, the Weevils were trying to communicate with _them_. It was a violent killing spree, and yet could it be considered some kind of weird warning? A warning that just didn't interpret; a panic, fear written in blood. "One of us? There's more than one of you?"

Harold grinned at him in a predatory way. "Oh yeah. When we first fell through the Rift, I thought this was hell. But we've adapted, and now we see what Earth is: a paradise. The perfect place for a new home."

Ianto was glad he'd gone back to being numb, because he was sure he'd have felt a cold shiver if he could have felt anything at all. "You're talking conquest."

He chuckled mirthlessly. "More like colonization, and it's already well under way. You can't fight what you can't see, can you? Oh, I suppose you could ask the Weevils for help ... but, wait, you people don't talk to them, do you? How many centuries out are you from developing control collars? Pathetic. You Humans are so backward, and yet you think you have all this technology." He made air quotes around the last word. "Please. How the Daleks haven't conquered you yet I have no idea. I'd think even the Zygons would be in with a chance."

He could hope he was lying, trying to dishearten him, but that seemed like an egotistical thought. Why would he care how he felt? He wouldn't. This bastard was gloating. "We will stop you."

He chuckled. "No, you won't. But you keep believing that. Stiff upper lip and all that, keep your chin up, old chap."

Ianto threw a punch, aiming for the center of his face (the crunch of his nose as it broke would be so satisfying), but his fist went through thin air and he stumbled, nearly falling onto an empty seat.

"No, you're not getting it," Harold said behind him. He turned, and Harold was standing near the front row, far out of range. "If you want to stick around, Ianto, you need to cooperate with us. The more you fight us, the sooner we'll get rid of you."

"An empty threat. You need my body to survive."

"Yes, your body. The rest of you is irrelevant."

Oh, now he saw what he was getting at, and he felt a vague sense of illness once again.

He was trapped, a prisoner inside his own body. And he had no idea what he was supposed to do.


	7. Chapter 7

7

_A Long Time Ago – A Long Time In The Future_

Jack woke up in the bathtub, although it took him a couple of moments to recognize it as a bathtub. His first thought was it was some kind of overgrown agate mixing bowl.

That was actually partially correct; it was a piece of a rose colored agate style rock molded into a half melted bowl shape, set off against the gray slate style walls and ceiling. There were no nozzles, but little holes in the wall set into tiny clusters. A bathroom of some sort, very modern, and possibly not made for Humans or even bipeds.

Oh man, what had he done last night? He laid on the cool stone, and tried to think.

He remembered crashing a party on Latharian, and meeting a really nice couple of Lathans who seemed open to his flirtation. (Hey, they were both really cute. And the things Lathans could do with their tails – wow.) They had a few drinks together, and then they invited him back to their place. He went, and ... well, things were fuzzy before they even got out the door. He should have known any more than four m'rthrans and he was completely wasted, but oh no, he had to indulge. (It said so in his file with the Time Agency – his biggest problem was impulse control. And arrogance. But he objected to that last bit.)

He still had some hangover cure strips in his pocket – did he travel anywhere without them? - and he let one dissolve on his tongue while he tapped his wristband and consulted it. A small hologram projected just over his wrist showed him his exact coordinates: somewhere in the middle of the Rheng system. Which was weird, because there was nothing in the Rheng system, especially the middle of it, which was about as empty as space got.

The pounding of his head started to subside as the cure raced through his bloodstream, so he asked, "Where the hell am I?"

The microcomputer in his wristband replied, in its smooth female machine voice, "Aboard the Macaram Starflower, tier twelve, section twenty five."

"The Macaram Starflower?" he repeated. "That sounds like a – oh no." Now that he could stand, he got up and bolted to what looked like a little round frame stuck to the wall. He put his hand in the center of the frame, and it cleared, showing him the inky blackness outside.

Bloody hell. He was on a cruise ship.

Consulting his wrist computer again, things started to shake out with a bit more clarity. The Starflower was the only ship from the Western arm of the galaxy allowed to dock at Ngata's sub-orbital city, Ygala, and that was where his next assignment for the Time Agency was, Ygala. The problem was, the nature of the assignment would only be revealed when he arrived, and Jack knew from hard experience that that was never good. Those were usually the most dangerous, nastiest, virtually suicidal missions.

Which made no sense. Ygala was a floating casino.

Okay, yeah, the Ngatai were a highly secretive, restrictive, and war like species, but Ygala was considered removed from the planet, which is why they allowed "foreigners" there at certain times of the year (otherwise, any foreigner on the planet's surface faced imprisonment and death – they _really _didn't like tourists). But why would they have something treaty threatening on their only source of exported income? The Ngatai were aggressive, sure, but they weren't stupid. Maybe this was just a spotted goose chase; maybe the Time Agency did this to him as punishment for his tendency to go outside the line of his missions. Hey, if you couldn't have a bit of fun, why be a Time Agent in the first place?

How did he end up on the ship anyways? He was leaving a party with a couple. Wait a second – did the Lathans actually work for the Time Agency? Son of a bitch, that was sneaky. Bastards. Did they even give him any luggage?

As it turned out, no. Luckily, he thought he was pretty presentable, and he had enough credits to get whatever he needed. He checked himself in the mirror to make sure he didn't look like he'd just woken up in a bathtub, and then went out to get the lay of the land (so to speak).

The ship appeared to be made of semi-translucent blue glass on the inside (probably a special polymer), giving a cool glow to everything. From what he learned from his computer, it could hold a thousand people, but this cruise only had five hundred and sixty three beings on it, not counting crew. Barely even half full? That was hardly worth a launch. Still, they probably had no choice, as nobody liked to give refunds.

His computer projected a small holographic blueprint of the ship, letting him know where he was and where everything else was in relationship to him. Handy, but hardly needed, as there were little interactive maps at stations along the corridor. In spite of everything they offered, there was really only one place to go on any cruise ship: the dining room.

The dining room a/k/a galley, was huge. It was about the size of your average shuttle garage, with seven tables about three meters long just groaning under the weight of all the food available, including some that still appeared to be alive. The smell of it all was overwhelming, sweet mixing with savory, rank mixing with seductive.

On the periphery of all of this was scattered round tables and chairs, some in odd geometric shapes you'd be hard pressed to say actually were chairs (but they were, just not for humanoids). There were several species on display, running the gamut from the hairy mammalian Brymadas to the large, vaguely reptilian and squid like Vurtels (as fierce looking and as large as they were, they were sweethearts. It wasn't their fault they had huge slimy tentacles – evolution was funny like that). He scanned the crowd and found a couple of potentials, but just as he decided to go chat up an attractive looking Riana, he spotted a single humanoid sitting alone at a small table near a port window. Was he Human? From here, he looked it.

So Jack got himself a cup of what passed for coffee on twenty three worlds (wasn't, but it tasted a bit better, so he could live with it), grabbed something that looked like a pastry product, and went over to his table. "Are we the only Humans here?" he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down uninvited.

The man looked at him, surprised but not offended. He was cuter than he thought. Of Asian extraction, he had almond shaped eyes and glossy black hair, with delicate bone structure and flawless skin. He looked young too, early twenties. "I think so. I was starting to think I was the only one on board."

"I'm Jack."

"Skylar," he said, and reached across the table to shake his hand.

After that, small talk ensued. Skylar was from Newal Three, and the cruise was not his idea – his parents bought him a ticket, hoping he'd "meet someone", which Skylar reported with a roll of his eyes. Save for checking out the same Riana Jack had been checking out, Skylar admitted he wasn't interested in trolling for a mate. He was really into his job, which was working as a researcher for OmniMundus (or Om for short, if you were the sarcastic or ironic sort), which was one of the top three corporations in the known universe. It did everything, from solar batteries to asteroid mining, from dehydrated foods to weapons grade teranium. They had these happy, chirpy commercials that made Jack think he would kill himself before he ever worked for a place like that, but a lot of people didn't have a choice. For instance, there wasn't a lot on Newal Three if you weren't into kelp processing or customer service.

There were several screens displaying on the upper edge of the wall, but unless you tuned in to their specific audio frequencies they were just video wallpaper, easy to ignore. But as if on cue, there was one of those chirpy ads for Om, with their tag line _"Perfect is Possible"_ appearing on the screen in bold blue font.

Skylar saw it and scowled. "I always hated that line. I mean, I work for them, and even I don't know what it means."

"Eh, it's just a slogan that tested well. It could be "Monkey kitten jetpack". As long as people buy their stuff, they don't care if it makes sense."

Skylar graced him with a sly smile. "I prefer monkey kitten jetpack."

Jack leaned forward, giving him a winning grin, and said, in a mock conspiratorial whisper, "Me too."

And he wondered if the chill he felt when he saw the phrase _"Perfect Is Possible" _unfurl across the screenwas a case of deja vu, or a premonition.

* * *

_Today_

Jack was scanning Harold's body for the second time when he found what could be considered a bite mark.

Considering the number the lorry did to his body, he couldn't say with a hundred percent certainty it was the result of a bite, it had a better than seventy percent chance of being what they were looking for.

It was on his right leg, near what was left of his ankle. (What a speeding truck could do to a body wasn't pretty.) Jack had the computer working on what could have bitten him, but there was so much damage and so little of it left that he was pretty certain results would be inconclusive.

So what were they dealing with? An alien that needed death to move on. But where did the bites come in? Jack wondered if there was a type of dramatic misdirection going on here. Maybe death didn't enter the equation; maybe this lifeform wanted them to think it did. So they'd be looking in the wrong direction, and they'd be unable to save Ianto. Yeah, that sounded frustratingly plausible. He punched the autopsy table in restless anger, hurting his knuckles and not giving a shit. He didn't like being played, and he especially didn't like when his friends were pawns in the play.

And there was obviously more than one of them. Harold's "friend" must have been responsible for turning the CCTV camera away from the diner, maybe even for releasing the Koslovains in the diner in the first place. How many of them could they possibly be dealing with?

This life form knew he couldn't die, so going through his people was the only way it had to cause him pain. Was Gwen next on the hit list?

"I've got him," Gwen announced from Tosh's workstation. "He's on his way downtown, he ... wait a minute. I think he's headed back towards Harold's condo."

Jack left the autopsy room and climbed back up to the central area of the Hub. Gwen looked at him in confusion. "Why would he go to Harold's flat? That's like the second place we'd look for him."

"Exactly. It's a trap." He grabbed his coat off Ianto's chair, where he had left it, and shrugged it on. On Tosh's monitor, a street scene was displayed, people walking the sidewalks and cars driving past, urban generic. Only there was a little green neon circle, surrounding the face of the person the computer had been searching for. Ianto, walking down the street, back now turned to the camera as he disappeared at a leisurely pace, headed towards the silver thatch of condos at the end of the block. It wasn't quite his stride, but close; he was getting more comfortable in Ianto's body, more accustomed to it. That pissed Jack off so much he had to grit his teeth against an impulse to punch the screen. He'd better not get too comfortable, because he was leaving a hell of a lot sooner than he ever planned. "I'm going."

"Whoa there," Gwen said sharply. "You just said it's a trap."

"It is. But he's only gonna get me, which will ruin his plans."

She stared at him, a harsh streetlight glare that had probably made suspects confess every now and again. "If you know what his plans are, share."

"Look, Gwen, I don't. But he's not alone." She raised an eyebrow at this. "Remember the camera at the cafe? Harold's not the man who fell to earth, he came with company, and he's out to make me suffer. He knows the way to make me suffer is through my team."

She got it, but she clearly didn't like it. "You think he's going to try and ... possess me or whatever?"

"I do. He'd have probably possessed me if he could, but my guess is whatever's keeping me from dying is keeping him out, although I have no idea how any of that works."

"And what makes you think leaving me here is any safer? Ianto got attacked while we were gone."

"Good point. Shit. Fine, you come with, but you stay in the SUV."

She scowled as she got up and grabbed her own jacket. "I'm not helpless, Jack. I can -"

"I can't lose you too," he blurted, and then took a moment to collect himself. Gwen, for her part, was stunned into silence. She probably thought this was some tender emotion on his part, but in truth, he was barely containing his fury. He had narrowed down the lists of suspects, and they were all foul creatures. If they hurt Ianto further, he was going to kill them, bring them back to life, and kill them again. Had they forgotten how deep his dark streak went? None of his Torchwood crew had really ever seen it, but these aliens surely had. And they were asking to see it again.

Fine. He'd be happy to accommodate them.

* * *

Jack wasn't surprised to find Harold's door slightly ajar. He nudged it open with his foot, walking into the condo with his hands visible, clearly unarmed. Except he wasn't – he had the stun gun hidden up the sleeve of his coat. All he needed to do was get within grabbing distance, and he could get the son of a bitch.

"Come on, Harold. You and I both know what's going on here."

Ianto came out of Harold's bedroom, sauntering into the coldly sterile living room like it was his home. Well, in one sense it was, and in another it wasn't – it made him appreciate the schizophrenic warmth of Ianto's actual flat all the more. He'd changed his shirt, opting for a black t-shirt that must have been Harold's, because it was both too baggy and too short for Ianto, showing a bit of flesh between the bottom of the shirt and the waist of his pants. But hey, Ianto had been looking good lately, at least he had a flat stomach if not a six pack; it wasn't a bad look for him. "Have you figured out who I am, finally?" he asked, in his flat, accent less voice. His wonderful blue eyes, usually always sparkling with some private joke, were as dead as his voice. The malevolence in them was palpable. "Gods, to think how many people you've killed in your life, Jack, that genocide is a poser."

"If you want me, why don't you take me?"

"See, now that's just dumb. You know you're not your average person, although these stupid Humans can't tell, can they? They have no idea what a hateful creature you really are. If they knew you were their future, they'd draw and quarter you, and rightfully so. We'll help. Hell, we'll tell them in the first place."

"We? How many are we talking about?" As he tried to keep Harold – Haranto? - talking, he edged forward ever so slightly. He knew from the encounter in the medical bay that Ianto had peak Human reflexes now, so if he was going to charge and be successful, he had to get close before he attempted it.

The alien glared at him through narrowed eyes. "Christ, you haven't figured it out yet, have you? My gods. How many people have you killed?"

"I've only killed in self-defense or defense of other people. I'm not a casual murderer, like you."

He scoffed. "Who have I killed, Jack?"

"Harold. And those people in the cafe."

"Means to an end. Do you know how bad Harold's cholesterol was? He was a time bomb of sudden death. He'd probably have died if we hadn't gotten to him first."

"We again. How many of there are you?"

He sneered in contempt, a haughty look that didn't quite fit Ianto's face. "We are legion. You are small, weak, in need of perfection."

Jack froze, feeling his guts twist as a cold shock slithered down his spine. It was a shock of dim recognition. "What did you say?" he asked, as he groped about in his mind for whatever that phrase had triggered. He had so many memories in his head, despite all he'd tried to forget, that it was like trying to find a specific grain of sand in the desert.

He eyed him with cold disdain. "Perfection is possible."

Oh god. No.

This was so much worse than he ever thought possible.


	8. Chapter 8

8

Jack wasn't used to feeling panicked. Even when he was mortal, it was a rare occasion that would draw such a reaction from him. He knew it never helped, and he never wanted to die as the shrieking, freaking out guy. If he had to die, he was going out useful and macho, damn it.

(As a result, he was curiously pleased – albeit slightly disappointed that he was dying at all – by his death at the guns of the Daleks. He died like a hero, the last man standing. It was both a disappointment and a total relief that it turned out to be a temporary death.)

But for the first time since he knew he couldn't die, he felt like panicking. This was a nightmare. This couldn't be happening. "You're bluffing," he accused, hoping that was the case. "You're a telepath; you just picked that up."

"A telepath?" He scoffed, trying to laugh but not quite achieving it. "Who can read your mind, Jack? Who would want to? Life's too short – well, for some – to deal with that muck."

When Tosh had that alien pendant, the one that allowed her to read minds, she told him later that his was the only mind she couldn't read. She didn't know why. But Jack suspected that existing more or less as a time dead zone, time didn't acknowledge his existence; he was, for all intents and purposes, dead. Dead to time, dead to space, dead as far as the fabric of the universe was concerned. He shouldn't exist, so some of the little details were blurred.

His stomach sunk. In fact, it felt like it was plummeting down to the ground floor. Ianto – oh god, what had he done to him? How was he going to save him? "You couldn't have survived. I killed all of you. You can't be here."

Ianto smirked – or, as Jack knew them to be, A1759, also known as Strain. "Did you really think Om was going to give up the experiment so easily? You and your Time freaks destroyed what you believed to be all of us, but Doctor Woon hid some of us away where you couldn't find us. He sent us through time and space. Only, we didn't end up where we were supposed to; somehow we got sidetracked."

"The Rift," he gasped.

Strain smiled, coldly and sharply. "We were supposed to go back to his past, when he was a young researcher. He was sure he could tweak us, make us less ... independent."

"Vicious," Jack spat. "Megalomaniac."

"Evolution favors the smartest and toughest. Don't blame us if you Humans, as you stand now, had no chance at all. After all, Jack, were we not made for you, for the Time Agency? You're like our great-great grandparents."

Jack abandoned his plan to stun Ianto – it wouldn't work. His nervous system was probably being enhanced and rebuilt as they spoke. The longer Strain inhabited him, the farther he would get away from humanity. Eventually, he would be unable to live without Strain, but then he'd be nothing but an empty shell for it, a flesh puppet. He would be dead, but his body – faster, stronger, "better" – would be walking around without him.

And he was not alone. Where there was one Strain, there was a thousand. Given time, a million.

"How many have you taken?" he asked, his voice a strained, angry whisper. It was better to give in to rage than to give in to despair.

Strain's grinned broadly, a look both gloating and predatory. "Like I'm going to tell you. Should I draw you a map, show you where to find them? No matter. We're going to visit you soon in Torchwood. You have many things we think we could utilize."

"I'll destroy it before I let you lay your hands on it," he snarled.

He chuckled, and for a heart hurting moment, it almost sounded like Ianto. "I'm sure you'll try. But you'll fail. This isn't the Starflower, Jack. This is a planet. We can escape anywhere and everywhere. The world is our oyster, as the saying goes." He scratched his face, and got a slightly distracted look on his face. "Stubble. What's the need for that? That's gone."

"Leave him!" Jack shouted, finding it increasingly difficult to rein his temper in. He wanted to attack him now. He wanted to kill Ianto, stop it before it got any worse, but if Ianto was still alive in there – and he must have been; colonization was recent, he was right there when Strain finally became dominant in him – he had to try and save him. He couldn't do it again. He didn't want to do it again. "I'll get you a host, someone who could really use your help. Just leave him."

Now he laughed, and while it was a genuine laugh, it didn't actually sound like Ianto. Possibly because it was cruel. "We like this one. He suits our purposes a lot better than the broken wreck of Harold ever did. He's young, he's strong, and he knows all sorts of things about Torchwood. And about you. Did you know, for example, that he think he loves you, but he's afraid to tell you? He thinks you'll finally admit you don't love him, that he's just a laugh, so he's decided to never tell you."

"Stop it."

"He's fairly certain you love Gwen more than him. He figures he's just a fuck buddy, whatever that is. You Humans and your mating rituals. Needlessly messy."

"Get out of his head!" His blood was pounding so loudly in his ears that Jack had to shout to hear himself speak. Was any of that true? Were they just making that up to torment the both of them? The bastards, the fucking bastards.

"Would you like to talk to him? He's still here, you know. He's trying to fight us. It's hilarious."

"Let him go!"

Strain grinned, showing nearly every tooth in Ianto's head. "No." Then his eyes rolled up and Ianto collapsed, sprawling on the carpet just short of the heavy coffee table.

It was a trap, a trick, something, but that didn't stop him from darting forward, reaching Ianto as his eyes opened and he looked around in obvious surprise, sitting up unsteadily. There was a light in his eyes, a warmth Strain had never learned to mimic (yet) that proved it was actually him. "Jack -" he said, and the Welsh vowels were back.

Jack grabbed him by the arms and gave him a quick, solid kiss. "Don't ever doubt that I love you," he told him, looking him in the eye. He couldn't die thinking – no, scratch that, he wasn't going to die. The moment he wrote off Ianto as dead, he would be. He couldn't do that.

Ianto grabbed his arms in response, and Jack could feel the heat in his hands coming through the sleeves of his jacket. Ianto's body was still trying to fight, but he was nowhere near as lethally hot as he was earlier; Strain was taking over, and dismantling all of his autonomic responses. Soon, he'd never have another fever again in his life.

Ianto seemed stunned, and probably still disoriented from everything that was happening. "I – I don't have a lot of time. They're colonizing the city, the -" he paused, shutting his watery eyes tight, and swallowing hard as his hands tightened his grip on Jack's biceps. His lips twitched like he was trying to soundlessly form a word.

"Where are they based? Do you know?" Oh, his brave boy, still trying to give him information to help defeat the enemy even as his body and mind was being destroyed. Strain obviously didn't know that, as mild as he seemed, Ianto Jones didn't ever go without a fight.

The grip on his arms was suddenly vice like, and when Ianto looked up, his eyes were like doll's eyes, expressionless and glassy, although his lips were twisted in a sneering smile. "Yeah Jack, like we were gonna let that happen," Strain said, and lurched back into a roll as he got his feet up into Jack's midsection, still holding on to his arms. Until he kicked him off and let go.

Flying through the air, Jack already guess what was going to happen before his back impacted with the window and shattered beneath his weight. Then he was falling outside, in the cold, slightly drizzly air, looking up at the velvet grey clouded sky of Cardiff as the tower block seemed to be racing up beside him, and gravity pulled him down like it couldn't bear to let him go. Shattered glass fell like prismatic hail.

He had a moment to apologize to Ianto in his mind before he impacted with something hard, and his consciousness was mercifully snuffed out.

* * *

**Onboard the Macaram Starflower**

You know, he changed his mind about this assignment – it was fantastic.

Skylar was a hell of a lot more fun than he originally appeared, or at least he was when you got enough Sunblasters in him. Of course, Jack had to go all the way back to junior academy to recall anyone who could get totally wasted on only two of the drinks, but hey, Skylar wasn't used to letting his hair down. Jack felt that was what he was here for, to be the Director of Fun on this dreary little pre-packaged holiday snooze cruise.

Jack also loved it when he found himself a virgin, they were so rare, and Skylar, bless him, was an unplucked flower. Ah, he could hardly hide his eagerness to remedy that situation. Oh, apparently he'd been with a woman "once" (and just the way he said it, Jack guessed it was a sim woman or some other synthetic version that fell short of the actual real thing), but never a guy. He said he wasn't sure really that was for him. Boy, did he change his tune after two Sunblasters. After three of them, he was suggesting a three way with that Riana they both had their eye on.

You just had to love that kind of eagerness.

As it turned out, Skylar had a more bipedal appropriate stateroom on the seventh tier, done up in some kind of gold and white marble theme, with a bit of silver thrown around to make it seem more elegant. Most of the furniture was form mold, but the bed was hydrofoam and really nice. A bit like sleeping on a cloud, although more someone's idea of a cloud than an actual one (not just because you'd fall through an actual cloud, but also because a cloud was mostly water vapor, and despite it's name, hydrofoam wasn't damp).

Skylar also had a bathtub/shower that actually more or less resembled a bathtub/shower, and Jack took a nice long shower, filling the bathroom with steam. Hey, it was good for the pores.

When he came out, wearing nothing but a smile and a towel, he was surprised to find Skylar still sacked out, snoring very faintly. But he supposed he had to extend him some sympathy; he wasn't much of a partier. So Jack sat on the edge of the bed and gave his back a little push. "Hey, Sky, if you get up now we'll catch the tail end of that brunch you were telling me about." Sky had told him yesterday that there was a brunch every afternoon (ship's time) where a Merkatan chef folded all the baked good into a series of flora and fauna. He said it was like eating a diorama, and weirdly, that did hold a kind of appeal. At least it wasn't something Jack had done before, and that was rare, as he almost never encountered something he'd never done before.

Sky groaned into his pillow and didn't move. "I think my head's gonna explode," he complained.

"Oh, come on now. A little caffeine and sugar will heal you right up," Jack said encouragingly, leaning down and grabbing his pants from the floor. He took out one of the hangover cures from his pocket and rubbed it on the back of Sky's neck. It could be taken orally or dissolved through the skin; it was flexible. "How does that feel?"

After a moment, Sky let out a more pleasurable groan. "That feels good."

"Uh huh. So c'mon, get up, chop chop. There's things to eat and people to do. Why waste the time sleeping?"

Sky opened a single eye and looked up at him. "You are trouble with a capital T, aren't you?"

"Moi? Never."

He sighed, and pushed himself up to a sitting position, the pain gone from his eyes. "Either I'm glad I met you or I regret it immensely. I haven't decided yet."

"Most people decide both," Jack admitted. Well, those who didn't try to kill him, but he wasn't telling him that.

"Yeah, I bet." Sky stretched and stood, letting the blankets fall to the floor. He then noticed the fog in the room, and asked, "Did you turn my bathroom into a steam room?"

"It's good for the pores."

Sky gave him a slightly pissy look, but hey – one day, he'd thank him.

After he was cleaned up and they were both dressed, they headed out. As they were walking down the blue glass hall, Sky gestured to his wristband, and asked, "Do you have the Ethric 160 ugrade?"

"No, this is just an Eidolon 2X."

Sky clicked his tongue. "Old tech. You didn't strike me as the type that went for dinosaurs, Jack."

That made him grin wickedly. "Depends on the dinosaur." The Time Agency offered an upgrade, but he turned it down. Sure, the Eidolon wasn't cutting edge anymore – it was when he got it – but it had the most stable system, and it wasn't invasive nanny tech, like the Time Agency used now. He preferred there to be some mystery between him and his computer, as well as between him and the Time Agency.

"You're incorrigible," Sky replied, with an interesting mix of affection and exasperation.

The lift doors slid open as they approached, and inside the lift, a Brymada was laying splayed on its back on the floor.

"Hey, are you all right?" Jack asked, quickly moving to the side of the fallen alien. Sky was right behind him.

The Brymada didn't answer. It looked like a female, slim, short, and brown furred, the chest heaving as she struggled to breathe. Jack pried open one of her eyelids, only to be greeted with the white of an eyeball. She seemed warm, wet with sweat, giving off that peculiar boiled cabbage Brymada smell. "Too much to drink?" Sky asked hopefully.

"No. I wish." he said, then barked to the lift, "Sick bay, now." Sky hopped inside before the lift doors closed.

Jack picked the Brymada up carefully, she couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds, and Sky asked, "What's that smell?"

"Wet Brymada. She's sweating like crazy."

"Feverish?"

"I'd think so."

"Maybe it's the Crosarian flu. I had that once. I hallucinated I was in a bean pod for two days."

Now that almost sounded like fun. But the doors opened on the sick bay, and any joke Jack was going to make died on his tongue.

All the beds he could see were full.

It was a cavalcade of aliens, a cross section of the galaxy: Brymadas, Lathans, Riana, Morsei, even a Vurtel sitting lumpen on a square bed like calamari on a piece of toast. The smell of illness, of warm skin and fever sweat, overwhelmed the scent of wet Brymada. The doctor, a four armed Yslana, came up to them seemingly harried, a digital clipboard clasped in a lower hand and his blue scales glistening. "Not another one. How are you? Have you been exposed?"

Sky suddenly looked fearful. "Exposed to what?"

One of the doctor's arms flailed helplessly, as a robotic gurney rolled up to take the Brymada from Jack. "I'm not sure. I'm thinking it's Krisellan fever, although the tests are inconclusive."

"Krisellan fever?" Jack repeated, laying the Brymada gently on the gurney. "I thought that was declared extinct twenty years ago." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sky give him an odd look for knowing that, but he didn't say anything. When Sky asked him what he did for a living, Jack had told him he was an artist, mainly because that was a job description he hadn't used yet. Next on the list was robot repairman and dog walker.

The doctor nodded, its diamond shaped head bobbing up and down on its thin, reed like neck like it was on the verge of falling off. "I know, but it's the only thing I can think of that would be this virulent, that would cross this many species barriers."

"Since when do Vurtels get mammalian diseases?" Jack asked. They were one of the species that had been immune to Krisellan fever.

Two sets of shoulders rolled under the long teal lab coat, meaning the doctor had shrugged. "I'm thinking this is a mutant strain."

"Really mutant," Jack commented, looking around the medical ward. Half the size of the galley, it must have had fifty beds, and not only were all taken, but there were some patients on gurneys pushed up against side walls. This was an outbreak; an epidemic.

Jack suddenly wondered why the Time Agency had really sent him here.


	9. Chapter 9

9

Being in Torchwood taught you that paranoia wasn't a bad thing. In fact, it was very close to precognition.

Gwen didn't want to wait in the SUV, but she'd seen the internal security footage of what happened to Ianto before he collapsed. He was talking to someone who wasn't there; he seemed insane. But worse yet, he seemed helpless as he was attacked by something that wasn't there, that couldn't be seen or fought. It made her blood turn cold. Poor Ianto, he never had a chance. And she didn't want to end up like that.

So she sat in the SUV cradling her gun in her hands, looking alternately at the clock in the dashboard, the street around her, and Harold's condo. Her stomach was knotting like a fist, like it did sometimes when she was on stakeouts and something started to go wrong. Okay, she was just on the one stake out in her entire career, and the thing that went bad was a kid buying E who dumped it in a bin and ran when he realized there was a set up going on. But when he reached in his pocket, it could have been a gun or a knife. (It was a mobile. His mum had chosen an ironic time to ring him.) But the feeling was back and felt the same, a sense in the air like a charge, like things were bound to go tits up.

How long had been Jack been gone? It was five minutes that felt like ten. She had just decided to go ahead and go up anyways, trap or not, when she noticed someone staring at her in the side view mirror.

He was a black youth, lean and tall, smoking a cigarette and looking bored, but she felt a chill that he was looking at her. Staring at her in an aggressively irritated manner, like he was waiting for her to do something. To get out of the SUV?

And there was another one. An old lady with stooped shoulders and a crocheted lavender hat across the street, someone's granny holding a Tesco's shopping bag, stopped in the middle of the sidewalk for no reason and staring at the SUV like she couldn't make out what it was. And down the street, a spotty youth on the corner in a white button down shirt and black tie, handing out religious pamphlets, constantly glancing at the SUV like he thought it might transform into Satan and attack any second.

Jack had said the thing that attacked Ianto wasn't alone. How many of them were there? Was she just being hyper-sensitive, or had she just spotted some of the others? Were they keeping watch, or ... were they waiting for her to get out of the SUV?

She decided to stay in the car, and waited to see if any of them would make the first move.

The explosion broke her concentration, and forced her to move.

Or, when she first heard the noise, one of sharp impact and shattering glass, followed closely by horrified screams and the insistent, ululating wail of a car alarm, her first thought was bomb. She jumped out of the SUV, gun drawn, not sure where it had occurred, but then she saw broken glass falling to earth from Harold's condo, and looked up. There was a hole in the glass fronting, on Harold's floor, and there was a Range Rover parked just two cars down from her that now seemed to have no glass in the windows at all.

Then she saw a foot hanging over the side of the bowed in roof of the Rover, like someone's idea of prank.

"Oh Jesus," she exclaimed, running to the auto. The car alarm continued to wail, and people had scattered, as if it actually was a bomb and not a person thrown from a tall building. She quickly looked around, but not a single person she noticed staring at her – the guy with the cigarette, the granny, pamphlet man – was around anymore. How did the old lady disappear that fast?

It was Jack, of course; she really didn't think it would be Ianto. She wasn't sure either of them could kill Ianto, although Jack actually would probably do it before she did. He could be very ... intense.

She tried to drag Jack off the roof of the compacted Range Rover, but he was always heavier than you thought he would be. Also, there was a surprising amount of blood, making her think that the back of his skull had split open. She had once been at the scene of a suicide, a boy who jumped off a bridge, and his skull was just collapsed like a rotten melon. It made her nauseous just thinking about it.

She heard the familiar purr of a well tuned engine, and saw the SUV pulling away from the curb. "Ianto, stop!" she shouted, aiming her gun at the car as it sped off. Not that shooting would have mattered – the glass was bullet proof. But why did Ianto – Harold, whoever – steal the SUV? There was a tracer in it you couldn't get rid of unless you dismantled the whole bloody car. Maybe he didn't know that. Or maybe it was what he wanted, them to trace him; maybe it was part of the trap.

But what sense did that make? She was right here right now, out of the SUV, with Jack out of commission. Why not possess her or whatever? What factor didn't work? Out in public? That didn't stop Harold from walking into the path of a lorry.

Maybe Jack was the factor here. With him out of commission, how could they enjoy his agony over losing another team member? Instead of waiting to see his reaction, they wanted to see it at the moment of occurrence. What sick bastards. What could Jack have done to them? Or perhaps she should say what did they think he did to them.

No. Jack knew these aliens, of that much she was sure. Strangers could be this vicious, but it was rare.

She heard distant police sirens, and worked extra hard to drag Jack off the Range Rover. She managed it, but his head bounced off the pavement when he landed. Couldn't be helped, but at least you couldn't hurt the dead too much. She had to hide his body before the police arrived. Sure, she could declare it a Torchwood scene and shoo them off, but her boss suddenly coming back from the dead? Yeah, that was a conversation she didn't want to have.

As soon as she hid him behind a dumpster in the alley, the first panda car pulled up. She greeted them with her Torchwood badge and asked them to move along. Luckily she knew one of the cops, and while no one was particularly happy with her, they listened and did move on.

When she returned to the alley, Jack was conscious and sitting up against the wall, looking distracted and unusually worried. "What happened up there?" she wondered.

"He's been infiltrated by Strain."

"Pardon?"

"Strain. An intelligent virus genetically engineered in the fifty first century. In numbers, they begin mimicking neuronal networks, and can communicate with other viral clusters via a poorly understood process that seemed to be a sort of chemical telepathy." Jack looked up at her, and he seemed as haunted as she had ever seen him. "We have 'til the end of the night to save Ianto, and then he'll be gone."

Intelligent virus? A smart cold germ? Why would someone make a virus smart? It didn't make a ton of sense, but he seemed dead serious. "It'll kill him?"

"His brain will be rewired completely. He will be the virus."

She would have accused him of making that up if he hadn't looked so sick about it.

* * *

It was an odd sensation to not feel yourself, and yet be aware that you were slipping away. Ianto didn't know what to make of it. It was like being awake during surgery, but the local anesthesia was working so you couldn't feel them cutting you open and removing pieces of you, but you could see it happening and be unable to stop it.

Did Jack get the message he was trying to send? At the end he had to mouth it, it took him back over, and he ended up screaming in his head for Jack to get away, because he knew he was going to hurt him. Maybe he couldn't kill him permanently, but each death hurt.

He felt like giving up. Nothing he was doing was working. He couldn't fight them, and he couldn't escape. He felt like giving up, like wallowing in despair, but he knew he couldn't give in that easy.

He found a way to get at them purely by accident.

Ever since he was a kid and he was upset about something, he invariably hummed to himself. His mum had actually told him to do that when he was scared of monsters under his bed, that it would keep them away. (He knew now this never worked.) He'd adopted it as a kind of unconscious comforting mechanism. But when he started humming this time, he heard the song as if it was coming out of the movie theater speakers.

It surprised him at first, especially when it was a song by The National, a group that he'd never heard of but Lisa had loved. He didn't realize he'd remembered it that well, but she had played the CD quite a bit. Unconsciously he must have absorbed most of it.

That was when Harold, who'd left him alone since their first confrontation, suddenly reappeared. "What do you think you're doing?"

That caught Ianto up short. But he'd heard genuine annoyance in Harold's tone, and his body language was tense. So he leaned back in his seat, and said, "Listening to music." He concentrated on Franz Ferdinand, and they started coming over the sound system.

"Stop it. It won't work."

Ianto decided to play dumb. Harold would probably buy it. "Won't work? What, is it bothering you?"

"No," he snapped sharply, and seemed to realize he was giving up the game, so he added, "It's atonal. It's hardly music."

Ianto was frantically searching his mind for music. What had he been listening to a lot lately? He needed something he could call up without thinking too hard about it, as Harold was killing his concentration. The new Radiohead was a given, and a song he realized was called "Bodysnatchers" started playing. His subconscious had a sense of humor. "I like it. You have my body, don't you? Go away and leave me to what little peace I can get."

As he thought, this made Harold's irritation worse. "We will get your Torchwood password. You're just making this harder on yourself."

Oh, what a laugh. They stripped him of his body, of all control, they were making him hurt his friends and participate in some kind of conspiracy, and they were going to make it _harder_ on him? Really?

He wanted to see that. He turned away from Harold, pointedly ignoring him, and started singing along with Thom Yorke. "I have no idea what I'm talking about -"

"Don't ignore me, Human!" he shouted angrily.

" - I am trapped in this body and can't get out -"

The blow to the back of the head came as a true shock to him. He hadn't been able to feel anything, but now the pain came as a lightning shock through his frontal lobe, and he found himself face down on the carpeted aisle before he'd even processed it.

Harold turned him over on his back, his fist raised to strike. "We can make you suffer. We've been kind to you. We don't have to be."

Ianto swung his fist, aiming for his face, but he punched nothing but thin air, and it felt like he was hit with an invisible fist, blood erupting in his mouth and running down his throat as a tooth loosened. Harold was suddenly over him again, fist still poised to strike. "You're running out of time, boy. We can cut it even shorter."

Could they? He was starting to have doubts. Because the longer this went on, the more he could sort of ... hear, was that the right word? It was like eavesdropping, finding voices in static, but it was probably more like picking up sensations, inklings, feelings proceeding thoughts. They were confident, they seemed to think they had this in hand ... but something was bothering them. It wasn't just Jack either, although there was some concern. Mainly, they needed to get to the Hub. Why he wasn't sure, but he knew it had something to do with the Rift.

Ianto grinned up at Harold savagely, hoping all his contempt came through loud and clear. "He's going to kill you. And I'm going to help."

Harold began pounding him, driving his fist into his face mercilessly, but even as he started to choke on his own blood, Ianto found it hard not to laugh.

He found their fear. The only question was, could he use it against them?


	10. Chapter 10

10

**Onboard the Macaram Starflower**

Jack had one day to believe the virus threat was over.

Half the infected died, but the other half seemed to recover with no ill effects. It was deeply weird, but not unheard of. Although, curiously, it was only the non-mammalians who died from the virus, including the ship's doctor. Neither he nor Sky contracted the virus, which was actually suspicious. Jack knew why he didn't contract it – the immuno-boosters used by the Time Agency usually kept any Agent from getting ill. (A real necessity when any germs you were carrying might infect a more primitive society and wipe them out, or you might get an illness that was fatal in its time period.) But why didn't Sky? It was possible he'd had some boosters too, but the ones available on the commercial market weren't as strong as the ones used by the Time Agency.

Jack still wondered even as the virus threat seemed to disappear as soon as it arose why Sky was immune. On the one hand, he was glad; on the other ... no, he was being paranoid. The sad thing was, even if you weren't a cynic, the Time Agency would turn you into one eventually.

He was in the lift one morning, on the way back to his room, when an unusual voice, high pitched and sounding not unlike singing glass, said, "Jack Hill, I am rerouting you to the cockpit."

Jack Hill was the alias he was using on board the Starflower, for no other reason than the last name he'd used was Gregson, and he was trying to go in alphabetical order. "Uh, okay. Never say no to a cockpit. Can I ask why?"

"I need your help."

Jack wondered who it was that needed his help, but as he felt the lift shift direction, he realized it must have been the pilot. Who else would have total control over the ship?

The lift opened on a large metal room that seemed to glow with a cool blue-white light, and he had a moment to think that perhaps he'd been rerouted elsewhere – engine room? - when he saw the pilot, and understood why the pilot's voice had sounded like singing glass.

It was singing glass.

Or, more precisely, a Lyssala. They were crystalline life forms who resembled semi-translucent crystal snowflakes, only they were about eight feet tall and hovered, and usually seemed to glow faintly with an internal light. This one hovered about two feet off the ground and was inside an energy cylinder whose forcefield glowed faintly blue at the edges. It had spikes going off in all directions, all very sharp and lethal looking, but the thing about the Lyssala was, as fearsomely alien looking and sharp as they seemed, they were generally as beautiful and gentle as their voices. The most beautiful music he had ever heard in his life was Lyssala singing; a glassy high pitched hum that made goosebumps prickle his skin and sent shivers running down his spine. It seemed to touch a pleasure center in your brain with their frequencies, so they could be eerie, and yet give you the best sex you've ever had in your life without touching you. "You are with the Time Agency," the pilot said, like a glassine hum.

There was no face to look at, so he simply focused on the hovering crystal in the general center of its body. "Why would you say a thing like that?"

"You have semi-artificial immuno-cells in your body," the pilot replied. "I scanned you."

"Is that legal?"

"Probably not, but with all that was going on, I needed to find someone I might be able to trust."

Interesting. The Lyssala weren't known for paranoia, so he had to assume something was up. "What's going on?"

"My crew are not themselves. I believe a foreign lifeform has taken them over, but I can't determine what or how."

Huh. That wasn't on his list of possibilities. "I assume you're not basing this all on behavior."

"No. There's been an increase in an unusual chemical that I believe may be some form of communication, but it's a language I don't understand. I do know it coincided with the illness on board."

Lyssala were super sensitive to light and audio wavelengths – which you would expect of a living crystal – but in a turn that showed how wonderfully inexplicable evolution and the universe could be, they were also super sensitive to chemicals and any kind of brainwave. Lyssalas were born lie detectors, and if you ever encountered a Lyssala detective, you were so screwed it wasn't even funny. But the one thing in your favor was they were so fragile that they spent most of their time in Earth standard gravity encased in forcefields. "Really? Was the illness a symptom of the takeover?"

"It seems that way. It doesn't make sense, but there it is."

"And you knew I haven't been infected 'cause of the immuno-boosters."

"And because you have no trace of the chemical signature."

"I can't be the only one on board." He knew why it wouldn't be infected – it was crystal. No bloodstream (technically), no pulpy organs, no susceptibility to viruses or bacteria. Or food poisoning, since their "food" was just a certain radiation wavelength. It was only vulnerable to breakage.

"Besides myself? Yes."

Jack shook his head. "Skylar didn't get infected either."

"He exudes the chemicals."

"Since when?"

"Since I started noticing the chemical's presence, around the time the infections began."

Well, that wasn't right. But there was no way in hell a Lyssala would get a chemical trail wrong; they were receivers, prisms, capable of reflecting back towards any source that put something out. "But that isn't possible. He never got sick."

"I can't explain much of this, Time Agent. That's why I was hoping you would help me."

He thought there was something odd about Skylar. Yes, he seemed to be a perfectly nice but somewhat socially awkward guy ... but that was it, wasn't it? It was almost like he had no idea how to mingle at all. It was possible, but in this time period and this part of the galaxy? Rather odd.

So what was Skylar's tie to the illness?

* * *

**Cardiff**

Even for him, Jack was acting weird.

They raced back to Torchwood. He was sure Ianto/Harold would come here soon, but not right away, and he wanted to get ready. But he didn't say what "get ready" meant. He said he'd take care of it, he only wanted her to "extract fluid from Harold's brain". Unquote.

After some arguing, she agreed to get one of Owen's frightening 1984 looking needles and get a needle full of ... something out of Harold's head, but only with great protest. Jack only said they needed it "for the scent". The scent of rotting dead body? You didn't need a hypo full of brain matter for that. Gwen went to the autopsy room to get it while Jack was working frantically on Tosh's station. "You tell me what the hell's this about, or I'm not doing this," she announced, before slipping on a breathing mask. It smelled worse than an open sewer on the hottest day of the year in here.

"Strain let Ianto out for a couple seconds, just to torment me and toy with him. But Ianto was trying to tell me something even as they resumed control. He was mouthing a word, and I had to try and figure out what he was saying, but only one word fit: Weevils."

Poor Ianto. Giving him two seconds of control and then yanking it away again? Pure, unadulterated sadism. "Weevils? Why would he say that?"

"I know! It didn't make sense, so I thought maybe he was saying "We something". We shall overcome, we are family, we will rock you, but none of that made sense either. So the more I thought about it, the more I realized – the Weevils. The Weevils freaked out because they sensed Strain. I know from past experience that there are a few alien races with very specific abilities that can sense Strain in a nascent form, and Weevils do have an astonishing sense of smell. It's possible they can smell Strain or sense it in some other way."

She moved the mask down to her chin, so she could talk and be heard clearly. "If they have such a good sense of smell, why do they live in the sewers?"

"The short answer? It doesn't smell bad to them."

"Eww."

"Hey, aliens. There's some who love pain, some who bleed syrup, and others who eat lava. Something for everyone in this big, beautiful universe."

There was a certain grin in his voice as he said that. Was he making things up again, or was he serious? Although it was hard to believe, she honestly believed this was genuine enthusiasm on his part. Jack seemed to adore the bizarre and outre; he lived for the strange. He seemed just like the type of person born into a universe that she couldn't comprehend, somewhere where you could run from world to world as easily as they could now cross the Chunnel to France. It made her wonder why he settled here, why he stayed if he so missed his world in the stars.

Of course, Ianto once told her over morning coffee that Jack had told him he was wanted on over a dozen worlds, but it was spread through different time periods so it wasn't that bad. If that was true, perhaps this was his idea of laying low.

"So why do we need a hypo full of Harold's head?"

"The Strain didn't actually transfer from Harold to Ianto. Ianto is infected with his own colony of it; they simply communicate chemically, so one group pretty much knows what all groups do within a half mile radius. There should be some Strain still in Harold's head, probably dead by now, but still viable for our purposes."

Okay, now that was disgusting. And raised the question of how Ianto got infected, but clearly when Harold stepped in front of that lorry, he knew Ianto was a brother infected or whatever. Harold's assignment must have been to get into Torchwood, and being a virus, why would they care about physical death? After all, they lived through it for a while. "And our purposes are ..?"

"Strain will be on its way here, maybe to try and return to its original time period, I have no idea. But they won't all come. There will be other possessed people out there, waiting. So while Strain comes here, the Weevils will be finding our other Strain possessed people for us."

"Like bloodhounds."

"Correctomundo."

"Umm, there's a couple of problems with your plan, Jack. We can't talk to the Weevils. We can't ask them to do this for us."

"What makes you say that?"

Was he serious? "Have you ever had a conversation with a Weevil? They don't talk. They growl and roar and occasionally whimper, but for the most part they just try and rip our faces off."

"Just 'cause they try and eat us doesn't mean they don't understand us. They could be choosing to ignore us."

"What? Have you been eating the funny brownies again?" Whatever possessed Owen to actually make pot brownies she had no idea, except he thought it was funny. But it wasn't funny at all, especially when she ended up eating an entire bag of Cheetos, and she didn't even like the bloody things. And there was that whole Toshiko/Ianto make out session that just seemed to embarrass everybody (except for Jack, who pronounced it "Kinda hot. To make it worse, Owen sort of agreed).

He chuckled faintly. "No. They're not as dumb as they lead us to believe. I think as a species they're just remarkably passive-aggressive."

"You're mad." But she also didn't have any better ideas, so she put the mask back on and stuck the needle in what remained of Harold's head, hoping an alien parasite didn't just explode out of the thing. That would just put a capper on a brilliant day.

Gwen soon learned she'd spoken far too soon.

The hypo full of disgusting brain juice wasn't hard to get; nothing exploded out of his cranium. But after Jack was done setting something up at Tosh's station, he told her they were going out a sewer access hatch hidden in one of the sub-levels. So, straight into the sewer, huh? She was going to start charging Torchwood for all the clothes she lost to muck and aliens.

She wanted to keep the breathing mask on, but Jack wouldn't let her. At least he took the needle full of ... well, whatever it was full of. It was tinged pink with blood.

The sewer was pitch black, and reeked ... of a sewer. It wasn't going to smell like a bakery, was it? Still, it smelled a tad better than Harold's body. She let Jack lead the way, and tried not to look down at whatever they were sloshing through as their eyes adjusted to the dimness. The silence was eerie, as heavy as the humid scent weighing down the air. "Jack, Ianto knows all the security protocols," she said, pitching her voice in a whisper. "The virus will know what to expect from him."

"So it thinks. But Ianto's going to fight them as long as he can, and that's what I'm counting on for it to work."

What? "Another surprise from the files of Tosh?"

"Basically. I've been thinking how fast Strain took over the ship, and really, all of Cardiff should be in the grip of Strain. But it's not. It's having to seriously adapt to this world. Why?"

What ship? Oh, bugger it. Even if she asked, she probably wouldn't get a straight answer. "Yeah, why?"

"Haven't you been keeping up with the news? All the hormones and chemicals being found in the water supply, the air, the ground. For once, the pollution might be a good thing. There's something here that Strain doesn't like."

"So we just get some nuclear waste and it's done?"

"If you mean the entire Human race, sure. Strain will adapt to the harsh conditions, that's what it was designed to do, so we really need to get it now before adaptation is complete."

"Somehow I have a feeling the Weevils won't get them all."

"I wasn't counting on them to, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did, given time."

"But that's another thing. Even if they do track down the infected people, Jack, they're not just gonna kill the Strain. They're gonna kill the people too."

Jack did something she really didn't like: he rolled his shoulders in a regretful shrug. "Most of them are gone already, Gwen. If we kill Strain, we kill them too; that's unavoidable. Strain rewires the nervous system, makes a body a ship it can pilot. No pilot, and the ship is just dead meat."

"You said most. What about the recent infected?"

"If I can get it out of Ianto, we can try it on them as well."

"How do we separate the new from the old?"

"We don't. The Weevils do. My guess is they'll go for the ones who stink most heavily of the virus first, and that will be the older infected."

She saw several flaws in that logic, not the least of which was using the Weevils as both trackers and weapons, but before she could raise further objections, she thought she heard a noise behind her.

She paused and listened. "Jack -"

"We're surrounded," he said matter of factly, like that wasn't a big deal. But it was a big deal, because she couldn't see them, she could only hear a faint noise, growing louder, that eventually resolved itself into a chorus of growls.

Weevil faces started emerging from the darkness, alien and snarling, thin lips pulled back over jagged teeth. Her impulse was to pull out her torch, then pull out her gun, but Jack had been insistent that they not pull weapons unless absolutely necessary. This felt necessary, but he seemed to mean "under attack". She couldn't count how many were blocking both ends of the sewer tunnel, but she guessed at least a dozen, and quite probably more she just couldn't make out. If the Weevils decided to attack them, they were dead. No, strike that, _she _was dead – Jack would recover. Maybe that's why he was so nonchalant about all of this.

"We come in peace," Jack said, and she rolled her eyes at the cliché. "We have a similar enemy, and I think you know who it is." He threw the needle down forcefully, and she heard it shatter. After a second or two, the rumblings from the Weevils changed in pitch and tone. "We want to find them, but we don't know how. We know you can find them, that that's what the violence was all about. I think. Anyways, we're appealing for your help."

Again, a different kind of rumbling. Could Weevils snicker derisively?

"I know you have no reason to help us, except they're taking over the city. What do you think's gonna happen to you – all of you – when Strain has taken over? Please, help us before it's too late for all of us."

More rumbling, and this time one got close enough to lean in and ... was he sniffing her? Or she. Sexing Weevils was virtually impossible short of an autopsy table. But she really didn't like how close its muzzle was to her throat.

She forced herself to keep her eyes open and show no fear. Because there was no bleeding way she was going to die like a coward.


	11. Chapter 11

11

Ianto had now moved on to the Arctic Monkeys, and was beginning to wonder if he should have busted into his nameless collection of dance music. Mind you, he didn't listen to it at home, it had just been blasted at him in a number of clubs and the occasional rave, and while it all sounded sort of the same to him, it had been branded into his brain. He'd spent too much time in clubs. (Like he was a raver! He'd been to one as a teen, and that turned into a complete and unmitigated disaster. Shana, the beautiful girl he'd been trying to impress, sort of conned him into trying Ecstasy, and he did, and to make a long and strangely complex story short, he truly realized he was bisexual when he ended up making out with her twin brother, Shane. Well, he was both prettier and a better dancer, so he could make that argument in his favor. Poor Shana had not realized until that moment that her date was bi or that her brother was gay. Surprise! That was one of the most awkward drives home of his entire life. Shane turned out to be a real nice bloke though, a fun date until he went away to drama school. He had no idea if Shana ever forgave him or not.)

He was fading. The positive side of this was Harold and his crew couldn't inflict too much pain on him anymore, save for these occasional deep, stabbing pains somewhere deep inside his skull. It was like migraines released in three second bursts, and while he was glad they didn't last long, the fact that they weren't as crippling as they probably should have been let him know how far gone he was. That, and the fact that he knew what they were thinking more than ever.

He wasn't really surprised when Harold showed up again, standing in the aisle and scowling down at him like he was a pissed off usher. "This is juvenile."

"I wouldn't expect a life form that is basically a germ to even know what that means."

"We weren't germs. Don't be insulting."

"I'm juvenile, remember? That's what juvenile people do." He wished he had a bag of popcorn, and low and behold, he did. He was now holding one in his lap. So he looked up at the screen and tried to remember the rave, tried to picture it like a movie scene. But all that came up on the screen was blurry colored lights. The problem with Ecstasy – while it did have a bit of a fun aspect to it – was it totally fucked with your memories. All his memories were was just flashing lights, a throbbing beat, and the feeling of Shane's sweaty, warm skin pressed against his. These didn't translate too well to a movie screen.

"You are insufferable. Or are you just a sore loser?"

"We're not going to lose. What is it with you aliens having to rub Jack's face in it? If you just kept your egos and big mouths in check, you could take over and there'd be a chance he'd never know until it was too late. But oh no, you have to adhere to the Bond villain problem of running off your mouths prematurely and spoiling your own plans. For wannabe evil alien overlords, you really are a bunch of twats." He crunched some popcorn, wishing he had a good ale to drink. Then he did, and he was pleased.

Harold wasn't pleased, but then he didn't expect him to be. The only weapon he had against them now was words, and he intended to use them. His glower was deep and menacing, but Ianto ignored it, choosing to focus on what was going on in the true outside world. He saw a Cardiff street, but while it looked familiar, he couldn't immediately pinpoint which one. Bloody gentrification.

Suddenly Harold was standing in front of him, blocking his view. "You don't even have to know when the end comes, boy. Memory is its own prison."

Before he could even make sense of that, Ianto felt a shift -

- and tried to remember why he was in the office. What was he doing?

He saw the glossy pile of tourism brochures, and picked them up, stuffing them in the rack in general order. Yes, the Welsh tourism office was just a Torchwood front, but it was good to occasionally change things, so no one got too suspicious. There were occasionally new colorful covers to the same damn brochures, so whoever was paid to manufacture these things could earn their paycheck without getting out of bed. He swiveled the rack to make sure they looked real and not like a prop, and decided they did. Great. Now, what else did he have to do that he was putting off?

"Go home, Ianto," Jack said wearily. He'd known he was there watching for the past thirty seconds or so, but he was hoping if he ignored him he'd take the hint and go away.

He stiffened slightly, but returned behind the desk, calling up a menu on the computer. He should really change the password. He liked to every couple of weeks, but it was good to not adhere to a rigid schedule. "I have things to do, Jack."

"Nothing that can't wait. Everyone else has gone home; I suggest you do too."

"No." Let's see, what hadn't he used? 220Cadmium7843#x05* sounded good. Sure, using words was risky, but even hackers generally stayed away from the Periodic table.

"You were almost killed," Jack said, not unkindly, but with an edge to it, enough to still Ianto's fingers on the keyboard. "You need some time to process that. Denial doesn't work."

"You think this is the first time I've almost died? I've worked with Torchwood for years," he replied, typing again. As soon as he noticed his hands were starting to shake, he started the shut down sequence for the computer.

"So have I."

"So where were you during Canary Wharf?" he snapped, and it came out much harsher than he wanted. No help for it now.

"I was here, in Cardiff. The Rift really acted up that day. The dimensional rift in London made the one here vibrate like a guitar string. You've looked extensively through the archives; I'm sure you've seen some of the reports." He let out a weary sigh as he rubbed his eyes. "None of this had anything to do with human cannibals, though. Go home, get some rest, recharge. It's back to business as usual tomorrow, I'm sure."

"I have work to do. I don't need to go home." He got up and briskly walked passed Jack, into the cool, dark corridor leading down to the Hub. He heard Jack following him, but he didn't say anything, which just irritated him all the more.

Ianto felt like he was about to explode out of his own skin. He wasn't sure why he was so upset really. So what if he was almost bled to death and then eaten by Human cannibals? Was it any worse than almost being killed by Cybermen or any other goddamn thing? It was all death, and frankly, if Weevils killed him, they'd probably eat a bit of him too, so it was all a variety of degrees he supposed. And if he was buried, he'd feed generations of insects, eventually be shat out by worms. You always ended up someone's meal, one way or another.

Once inside the Hub, as Ianto looked for something to clean up (damn it, he'd already cleaned up! Everyone was usually such slobs, but they hadn't been here today, so there was no one to make a mess save for Jack ... and he hadn't, which was very pissy of him ...) Jack said, "You sustained a head injury. Any doctor would strap you down to a bed and make you stay there."

There was an obvious double entendre there, but you know what? He wasn't in the bloody mood for it. "I don't have a concussion, I just have a cut. Apparently my skull is as thick as everyone always told me it was in school." Oh good, Toshiko had left some papers and rice paper sweet wrappers at her station. He'd missed those before.

"I've never seen someone fidget themselves into a tizzy before. It'd be fascinating if it wasn't so worrisome."

"Fuck off!" It was out of Ianto's mouth before he could pull it back. Oh shit. Had he just told his boss to fuck off? Facing away from Jack, he closed his eyes and wondered why he couldn't do anything right. Everything he touched just turned to shit. He was the anti-Midas.

Jack was quiet for a very long time, so long that Ianto was sure he was trying to decide on the best way to fire him, which had probably been stewing since the whole Lisa incident anyways. He knew he'd been on thin ice; now he could feel it cracking beneath his feet, and he was afraid to face Jack. No, he wasn't sure he could live in the "normal" world after Torchwood, but maybe it would be for the best. Maybe they could Retcon him to his university days, and he could be made to believe he had a case of amnesia. Maybe he would at least let him suggest that.

Finally Jack went up the stairs, and he said, without looking back, "My office." His voice was clipped and flat.

As soon as he was in his office, Ianto sighed and let his shoulders sag. So this was it. In a strange way, it was a relief. He was never any good at this stuff, was he? He never quite fit in. He was a shitty butler anyways.

He headed up the stairs feeling like he was ascending to a gallows, and he tugged at his tie, loosening it, getting ready to toss it in the trash on his way out. Maybe he should throw it on Owen's desk; he looked like he could use a tie.

When he went in, he found Jack sitting behind his desk, opening a bottle and pouring dark liquid into two glasses. "I actually helped out in Torchwood Glasgow on one or two cases, and the leader there at the time, Marty, gave me this. I figured now is the time to try it out."

"Since when do you drink alcohol?"

He shrugged a single shoulder as he put the bottle down. "I do, now and again. Not often. I figure after all that's happened, we could both use a drink."

So he was trying to be kind. A drink, a "You're fired mate", and then the Retcon he surely dropped in Ianto's glass would kick in. Fine. It was probably nice of Jack to not be mean about this. Ianto dropped into the chair in front of Jack's desk, and grabbed the glass obviously meant for him. The scent of aged Scotch whisky burned his nostrils, and he blinked back nascent tears before holding his breath and swigging it down in a single gulp.

There was a single second when he thought perhaps he overreacted, as the liquid went down his throat warm and smooth. Then, just as he was beginning to think it was remarkably mild, it kicked like an angry mule, and it seemed to take his breath away. Jack was staring at him across the desk, looking mildly nonplussed. "I never pegged you for a whisky man, Ianto."

Heat rose to his face, as it always did when he drank a little too much, but he could breathe now, so he said, "I'm not."

"So why'd you shotgun it?"

Shotgun it? What a quaint American term. "I wanted the Retcon to hit me all at once."

Jack blinked once, true confusion now coloring his features. "Retcon? There wasn't any Retcon in it. Why would there be?"

Oh wow, what was the alcohol content of this stuff? It had only taken up a fourth of the glass – Jack had maybe poured them an inch or two of the stuff – but he could feel the warmth spreading throughout his body like he'd just had his second pint of the evening, and the knot in his shoulders started uncoiling. "Aren't you firing me?"

"What?" He chuckled out of surprise more than anything else. "No. I've been told off so much in my life I sometimes have to remember what's an insult and what isn't. I thought you needed to relax before you exploded." Jack sipped his whisky, and afterward said, "That's brisk. How are you still conscious?"

"I was wondering that myself."

"It's that thick skull of yours again," he joked.

Ianto supposed he should laugh or smile, acknowledge his continuation of his earlier remark, but he couldn't do it. He felt loose limbed and at loose ends; even his anger had fled, leaving nothing but exhaustion in its wake. He no longer felt like pretending around him. "What are you, Jack?"

"Pardon?"

"We know you seem Human, you're mostly Human, but you're not completely Human. No one says it, but I just have to know. Where are you from?"

"Earth."

"You're lying."

Jack stared at him for a moment, his blue eyes locked on his, but Ianto didn't look away. He had enough alcohol in him not to be afraid, to not care if he offended him or not. "Okay, yes. I'm from a colony world. It doesn't exist yet."

He also had enough alcohol in him that everything seemed slightly unreal. It probably helped that his stomach was completely empty, as the thought of eating made him feel like retching. "I see. What's it called?"

Jack shook his head. "It won't exist for a millennium. You don't even have a name for the system yet; it's just a number."

"So tell me. You can make something up and I won't know."

He seemed to consider that a moment, a muscle in his jaw briefly flexing before he said, "It's called Colios Three."

"No, you just pulled that out of your arse."

His face broke open in a broad grin. "How do you know?"

"You don't wanna tell me. You're just giving me something so I'll let it drop."

Jack continued grinning at him in an unsettling manner. "Look at you, going all Psych 101 on me. Is this the real you, Ianto Jones?"

"I'm too tired to play the game anymore," he admitted, and reached across the desk, grabbed Jack's glass, and gulped back the whisky he didn't drink. This was smoother going down, perhaps because the previous alcohol cushioned the blow.

Jack capped the bottle, and put it back in his desk drawer. "Enough for you. I think this is two hundred and eighty proof."

"I'm a Welshman. I've had worse." As if to undercut this sentiment, he had a sudden coughing fit. It felt like something was tickling the back of his throat – perhaps the whisky trying to come back up. But he held it back down.

"You did good," Jack said, and he wasn't immediately sure what he was referring to. Drinking the whisky and holding it down? Cleaning the office? At the village? On his first "away mission" ? (As Owen called it – actually, that was the least profane thing Owen called it)

"Yeah, I did fucking wonderful. I was almost somebody's dinner. What a hero I am."

"Everyone was almost someone's dinner. You were expecting aliens, not people acting like animals."

"You were." He fixed him with a hard stare.

Jack shook his head. "I expected nothing, that way my mind was open to more possibilities."

"Uh huh. You've encountered a lot of people who have been bloody fucking miserable to other people, haven't you? It pissed you off, but it didn't surprise you."

He looked briefly serious, and almost infinitely sad. "Live as long as I have, you encounter it a lot."

He almost asked Jack how old he was, but stopped himself, as that was another conversational dead end. He'd say "old enough to be legal", make a joke of it, or say "36", like his file had said for, oh, was it ten years now? More? Jack was so much older than he said, but he'd never admit it, nor say how he managed to look roughly the same throughout the years. (Again, Ianto expected a joke answer: plastic surgery, Botox, bee's urine, the same airbrushers who work on Tom Cruise.) Instead, he went with a question that troubled him more. "Why bother?"

"What?"

"Saving Humans. We don't deserve it. Let us rot. If we're gonna act like that, we don't deserve saving."

Jack seemed surprised by that. "You can't let a minority of you decided the fate of the entire race. You're capable of much better things. You will deserve your place."

"See? Right there, you're talking like you're not one of us."

"In a way I'm not. But I am, or at least I was."

More double speak, more questions he'd never answer. Ianto shook his head, sick of it all. "I quit."

"Oh, come now, it's not like you to give up so easily. Especially now. I like this feisty Ianto; it's a real turn on."

He stood up, somewhat unsteadily, and said, "No, you're not getting it. I quit. No more Torchwood."

Jack looked genuinely shocked. "You don't mean that."

"I'm not made for it, am I? I'm a – I'm a fucking coward, Jack. I don't want to die, but I especially don't want to die for nothing. I don't wanna die because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I have to die, I want it to have meaning, I want it to be while stopping ... something, saving someone, not hanging upside down on a meat hook. I'm useless, totally fucking useless." He started towards the door – why the room had decided to tilt now he had no idea, but it figured really – and Jack bolted up from his desk and stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

"It's normal to be afraid."

"Yeah, I know, so why weren't you?" He could feel his mood swinging, but he didn't care. Anger felt like more solid ground than self-pity; it felt hot and strong, made the room stop shimmering at the edges. "Do you feel anything? Do you have any goddamn feelings at all? Or do they not do that where you come from?"

Jack seemed unmoved by this, although something in his eyes hardened a little. "I think you need to sit down and calm down before you say something you regret."

"No, I need to get out of here. Get outta my way."

"No. Sit down."

Ianto honestly didn't know he was going to hit Jack until he did, a loose right connecting with his jaw in a manner that was heavy, shocking, and immensely satisfying. Jack hadn't expected it, and felt back against the door, surprise warring with -

- hey, was he laughing?

He was chuckling even as he wiped the corner of his mouth and saw the blood on the back of his hand. "I shoulda seen that coming," he admitted.

Jack's laughter infuriated him. He bunched up his fists and suddenly felt a black wave of rage wash over him. "See this, you motherfucking asshole!" He charged him, swinging wildly.

"Hey!" Jack ducked the hit and then grabbed Ianto's arm, stepping under it and swinging Ianto round, throwing him across the room, although Ianto managed to somehow stay on his feet. Perhaps if he didn't have the miracle of drunkenness, he wouldn't have. "You don't want to fight me."

"Stop telling me what I want!" he shouted, his fists clenched so tight he thought he might be breaking his fingers. "How arrogant are you? Why are you trying to save us when you'll never be able to save yourself?!"

Ianto had no idea where that had come from or what it even meant, but Jack look stung, his eyes bright and hollow with sudden, unexpected pain. It made Jack look honestly Human – an actual feeling, an actual reaction that wasn't connected to anger or false good cheer, the only two moods Jack usually bothered to show. It threw Ianto off because he hadn't expected it, and his anger just sort of floundered.

"What do you mean by that?" Jack finally asked, his poker face reasserting itself, but his eyes still looking wounded.

Yeah, he was wondering the same thing. But eventually his mind coughed up a reason. "You're trying so hard to save somebody, to save us ... you want someone to save you, don't you? That Doctor you keep waiting for maybe. But if he hasn't shown by now, why do you think he's ever going to show?"

"He will. He always does," he replied almost defensively, and then, after a moment, he exhaled heavily. "You don't miss anything, do you?"

"Men sneaking up on me with ax handles."

He smirked weakly, a sign that perhaps all was forgiven. "We all fall for that one now and again. You aren't in Torchwood until you've been clubbed senseless at least once." Jack wiped more blood from the corner of his mouth ... but his lip wasn't split anymore. How did that work?

"Then I should have a medal by now," Ianto pointed out, and sighed, sagging against the wall as the death of his anger left him feeling boneless. "Are you gonna let me go?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I need you here."

"To make coffee?"

"Well, of course." Jack then gave him one of his big grins – number four, the "I'm kidding, but only I think the joke's funny" smile – and said, "If only you used that brain of yours for good, you could be devastating."

Was he being insulted? "Meaning what?"

"Meaning I can't figure out why you constantly take the path of least resistance. You're incredibly perceptive, Ianto, a lot more than most people. You find the little threads that unravel an entire skein – when you want to, of course. You'd make a hell of a detective. You know more about me than anyone else, don't you?"

"I doubt it. Unless the others don't know you don't like hazelnut coffee."

"Not what I mean. And you know that."

He stared at him for a moment, unable to interpret the look Jack was giving him and not really interested either. He wanted to go lay down now; maybe the room would stop spinning then. Ultimately he sighed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. "I know this is useless. I know the others think I'm a joke, and rightly so. If you want to keep me on as a tea boy, fine, but don't pretend I'm useful. Don't insult me like that."

Ianto had turned for the door, but suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder, and Jack turned him around to face him. How'd he get across the room that fast? Or was he just moving slow? In retrospect, Ianto realized he was having to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other. Two hundred and eighty proof? More like three hundred and eighty proof. Never had so little liquor fucked him up so badly. "Nobody's as hard on you as you are," Jack told him. "Why are you beating yourself up?"

"Why not?" Seemed like a good enough answer.

The way Jack frowned at him, he didn't accept that. "I think you need to forgive yourself."

"For what?"

"I don't know. You tell me."

He stared at Jack, wondering what he could tell him that would make him happy – the truth was out of the question, mainly because he didn't want to look at it himself. He tried to squirm away from Jack, but it didn't quite work – he still had a firm grip on his arm. "Just let me go, okay?"

"Give me an answer."

He frowned at him. "Do you want me to punch you again?"

Jack gave him a slightly evil grin – number 7 – his eyes sparkling like ice on the water. "Take your best shot."

Was he taunting him? His anger flared, a weak spark, and he considered breaking his nose. He'd played rugby long enough to know he could headbutt anyone to their knees. He grabbed Jack by the collar of his shirt and considered it, wondering how satisfying the crunch of bone would be if he just smashed his head into the bridge of his nose, but then he caught himself off guard once again. No, this time he didn't punch him – he kissed him.

Jack seemed surprised, but only for a moment. Ianto kissed him desperately and he responded in kind. It suddenly occurred to Ianto that he wanted so badly to be touched that it had been one of his worst fears when he thought he was going to die. He'd never be touched by anyone again, never be kissed, and it had been _so_ long. God, he was so lonely; he was so tired of being alone with himself and all his ghosts.

He ran a hand through Jack's hair and let his fingers tangle it, yanked at his hair as he bit his lower lip, and Jack pulled away. "Whoa, big guy, a little rough -" he said, as he struggled to break away from him.

He wanted Jack to hurt him. He deserved it; he deserved worse. "I couldn't save her," he said, and suddenly it was like a dam burst. He thought he'd said it, but it was a sob, and the tears seemed to be coming out regardless of how he tried to hold them back. Every sob was like a punch from inside his gut, and his heart contracted and seized as he thought of her: Lisa. Oh god, why wasn't he smart enough, brave enough, good enough to save her? What did he do wrong? If he was smarter, braver, stronger, maybe she'd still be here.

He tried to turn away, but Jack grabbed him and held him, and he buried his face in the side of his neck. "Okay," Jack said softly, stroking his hair. "It's okay."

But it wasn't okay, and it wasn't ever going to be okay. The best thing in his miserable life, and he failed her when she needed him most. There was no forgiveness for that.

He would hate himself for the rest of his life.

There was a serious sense of disconnect for Ianto. He remembered feeling miserable, like he'd cried for years, but he found himself waking up somewhere, his head throbbing like an open wound, unable to breathe through his nose, his mouth feeling and tasting like someone had decided to wash their dirty sweat socks in it. What the hell had happened?

He tried to remember, snuggling into the warmth of his covers and trying to ignore the pain, when it suddenly dawned on him that it wasn't his bed. The pillow smelled very much like Jack.

His eyes shot open, and he moved a bit more quickly than his sickly head would have liked. But he was in Jack's bed, the one he kept in Torchwood, although he quickly ascertained he was alone – a bit of a relief there – and he was only partially undressed: his tie, jacket, and shoes were missing, but he still had everything else. Good. Didn't screw the boss. Although that certainly could only help your career, it still didn't seem like a monumentally good idea, especially when that boss was Jack Harkness. The line for who hadn't screwed him was much shorter than the line for those who had.

But – oh god. Had he really bawled like the world's biggest baby? All over him? Ianto wondered if you could die of mortification.

He tried to sit up, but a powerful wave of nausea washed over him, and he ended up laying on his side, his mouth watering and his stomach roiling, making him wonder if he'd make it to the bathroom in time or if he'd just barf on the floor.

He heard the door open, and Jack said, "Good, you're up. Don't move." Ianto would have asked him why, but before he was certain he could open his mouth without having the contents of his stomach spew out, Jack pressed something cool and smooth against his forehead. He couldn't see it, but the tide of nausea started ebbing, and in about a minute his stomach settled down. He still couldn't breathe through his nose, though. "Wow. What is that?" Ianto asked, as Jack removed it from his forehead. He could see it looked like a paperweight, a smooth oval stone that had a faint pink tinge to it, and was about the size of his palm.

"It's a Nacrian," Jack said, as if he should know what the hell that was supposed to mean. "It soaks up all toxins and digests them for energy. I use these on the odd occasion I over-indulge."

Ianto pushed himself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Jack looked chipper and well rested, like he always did. "You should market those as a hangover cure. You'd make a fortune."

He grinned (number three). "Except if you leave it on too long it fuses with your skin, and digests you. Besides, I couldn't see selling a living creature."

"It's alive?" Suddenly he was a bit grossed out.

"In a manner of speaking." Jack put the thing on his writing table, and Ianto could now see the Nacrian crystal – or whatever it was – was pulsing faintly. Holy shit, it was alive.

Ianto wasn't quite ready to face Jack just yet, so he excused himself and ducked into the bathroom. He was a fucking mess – his eyes were still swollen and red, and his hair had decided to become a sea anemone. Terrific.

He soaked his face in cold water as long as he could stand it – he'd picked up that trick from Lisa; it brought swelling right down – brushed the moldy fuzz off his teeth, and tried to tame his hair. At the end, he still looked like he'd spent most of the night crying. Damn it. Might not be anything for it. At least he had a spare suit upstairs, mainly because he knew from experience you could be Weevil hunting in the sewers or covered in alien goop when you least expected to be.

Jack had left him alone, and he thought he might be able to escape without encountering him, but he'd just left Jack's room when he intercepted him. "Feeling better?"

Well, best to get this out of the way. "Considering, yeah. Um, look, about last night -"

"What about it?" he replied cheerfully, giving him smile number five, the one that said "Nothing's wrong here; move on".

Ianto stared at him in mild disbelief. "That's – that's it? I -"

"The last few days have been tough. We all need to vent. No harm, no foul. But maybe you want to have dinner before you start shotgunning whisky again, huh?"

In a bizarre way, he'd almost have preferred it if Jack wasn't so understanding. He shook his head, not quite sure what to say. "I'm sorry. I don't know -"

Jack took his face in his hands, and kissed him. It was a deep, passionate kiss that took his breath away, and Ianto could do nothing but grab him and pull him to him. Embarrassment was replaced by desire – he wanted to pull him back into the room and finish what they started last night. He smelled so good, he felt so good it seemed wrong.

But Jack pulled away gently, still cupping his face, looking him straight in the eyes. "Any time you want me – sober - you know where to find me." He gave his face a gentle pat and then turned and walked away. "Tosh'll be here soon. You might want to get the coffee on."

He stood there, slightly dazed. "Uh, yeah." He just had a terrible premonition he could really fall for Jack. And what a disaster that would be.

Oh well. No help for it now. He went to put the coffee on.


	12. Chapter 12

12

**Aboard the Macaram Starflower**

Jack used his wrist computer to find the odd chemicals that the Captain had mentioned, and it was all over the place. The computer had analyzed it, but had been unable to determine what it was. It seemed analogous to a neurotransmitter, though, which indicated that he was right to be worried about it. Did this make them psychic to some degree? Were they in telepathic contact?

He went into the dining hall to get some fake coffee and a weird kind of pastry-sandwich thing, and he noticed a couple of things straight away. One, no one was talking. Not out loud, at any rate. They'd forgotten they were supposed to be verbally communicating if they were indeed the bipeds they were pretending to be. Two, he caught most of them staring at him. Not directly, usually askance, but almost all of them were. It made Jack recall an old Earth movie. What was it called? Oh yes – Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The invaded would point at non-invaded people and scream. They weren't doing that, but Jack was still waiting for them to do it. He left without being bothered, but it was all he could do not to run.

It was true, wasn't it? Everybody on board was gone. Those who didn't die had been taken over by something. And they all knew he wasn't one of them. It probably wasn't long before they captured him or killed him.

He found sanctuary in a lift, working out with his computer the best way to disrupt the chemical communication of the things. In truth, he couldn't; the chemicals just got around too easily. But he could isolate sections of the ship and set the air scrubbers on overdrive, convince them there was an airborne contagion, and that would severely limit the chemical's ability to travel – he could confine it to sections, so one section wouldn't know what another was doing. He'd need help to do it, though. "Captain, it's Jack. I have an idea."

He expected that crystal clear, humming voice to sing back to him. But the lift remained quiet. Communications were working, so it wasn't that. "Captain?" He stomach knotted, as he had a really bad feeling about this. "Take me to the cockpit, now!"

The lift still obeyed him, as overriding its basic programming – to serve all customers as long as it caused no harm – was still in effect. (It was one of Asimov's Basic Laws, filtered through customer service.) It would take the aliens a while to override such a fundamental command – in fact, it might be impossible without shutting down some of the basic systems. He still had his computer coming up with a schematic of all the service ducts he could crawl through if absolutely necessary.

Weapons of all kind, especially energy and projectile, were illegal on cruise ships. It didn't matter who owned it or where it was based, it was a galactic law. Jack pulled out his blaster, and made sure the power cell was fully charged before setting the power level. He should stun, he knew that, but he didn't think he had much of an option. He was severely outnumbered, in a confined space, and he could only assume that he was surrounded by enemies with a hostile intent.

As the door of the lift opened, he aimed his gun out and scanned the room before stepping out. The cockpit looked the same, but somewhat different, and the loud hum of the plasma drive engines seemed to fill the room like it hadn't before. Maybe because there was no force field barrier to buffer the noise.

He edged out, and as soon as he was sure he was the only humanoid here (his computer reported no mammalian life signs), he asked, "Captain?" And yet, as the word was still escaping his mouth, he saw slivers of milky light covering the silver deck plating, a rime of frost. Except it wasn't; he knew that even before he felt a shard crunch under his boot.

The Captain's forcefield chamber was shut down, and he was shattered into a million little pieces, scattered all over the cockpit.

He put a hand to his mouth in equal parts horror and rage. They murdered him. Just like that, like he was little more than a glass ornament, they killed him.

After a moment of silence for the poor, beautiful creature, he noticed the rumbling of the engines was different under his feet, and went to see what was going on at one of the auxiliary control panels.

It was dead, even though he could feel it still working, so he dropped to his knees and pried a panel off to have a look at its interior. A quick scan of it and a couple of slaved consoles proved that someone had fused the engine controls. They were going full speed, and there was no stopping them. They'd be docking at Ygala in no time, although they'd only be docking if Ygala's navigation beacons snagged them and shut them down ... which they probably would. Anything might have gone in Ygala, but everything else about it was micromanaged to a fault.

So these ... things were in a hurry to get Ygala. Why? Why else? If they could get loose there, they could have half the galaxy infected in no time flat.

It was the beginning of an invasion.

Jack allowed himself a moment of terrible, blinding rage, one that made him want to simply hull the ship, but then he let his training take over. There was a better way. But he was running out of time to act and he knew it.

He got to work on the environmental control panels as he connected his personal computer to the ship's computer and set it to work. The good thing about the personal computers given to you at the Time Agency was that, save for any nanny programs (which he didn't have), they had no strictures to obey Asimov's laws. They weren't that smart – they only obeyed laws their "owner" gave them, no matter how detrimental. This could be both good and bad, depending on the circumstances. This time out, it was very good.

He had to directly wire one system to another, ones not intended to be tied together, so he got a couple of nasty burns on his hands and cussed more than was probably necessary. He thought he felt some shards digging into his leg as he shifted beneath consoles, and it made his anger flare anew. Bastards.

But what if he could save some of these people? Wasn't he acting rashly? Could he kill them all? Maybe there was a way to save them, or save some of them. He had to try. But he didn't have enough information to even know where to start.

A quick check revealed that Skylar was in his cabin. Jack set the ship's air scrubbers on overdrive, and started the countdown.

He entered Skylar's cabin with his gun drawn, but Sky was in the bathroom, taking a shower from the sound of it. Jack aimed the gun at the closed bathroom door, and waited. He only had to wait two minutes before the door opened and Sky came out, wearing only a towel. "Hey Jack, you're – aiming a gun at me. Aren't those against regs?"

"Who the hell are you, and can the passengers be saved?"

Skylar studied him with his hazel golden eyes, and seemed vaguely amused. "Is this role playing? Are you an action hero from a vid?"

"Five seconds, then I shoot you in the leg."

"How very butch," Sky teased.

Jack shot into the wall beside him, close enough to make the towel flick. Sky didn't flinch, but his eyes hardened, and his amused look became a smug, vicious smile. "Took you long enough to figure it out, Time Agent. How stupid are you?"

* * *

**Now**

What the hell was Jack up to? Gwen was sure she was being left out of something, but she had no choice but to follow the Weevils.

It wasn't immediately clear if the Weevils were going to help them, but at least they didn't kill them and eat their faces off. The Weevils retreated, growling, and Jack told her to follow them. When she asked why, he said to keep an eye on them, stop them from attacking anyone who wasn't infected. She asked how she would know who wasn't infected, and Jack said that the infected ones were the ones the Weevils would attack first. That seemed less than helpful.

Also, he was going in the opposite direction, back towards the Hub. When she asked about that, he simply looked back, his face as stark as she had ever seen it, and said, "If I can't save him, I owe it to him to kill him."

If that was an expression of love or respect, it was the most bizarre one she'd ever heard.

She had a million questions, but he had already disappeared into the dark, and the Weevils were far enough ahead of her that she had to scramble to keep up. She pulled out her gun and took off the safety, ready to use it, but she wondered how many Weevils she'd drop before they ripped her arms off. It really wasn't something she wanted to find out. Maybe the best thing she could do was shout at everyone else to run.

She was just climbing up a rusty access ladder, wondering when she'd gotten her last tetanus shot, when she heard the roaring and screaming of Weevils on the surface already engaged in a fight. "Damn you, Jack," she cursed, scrambling up the ladder, feeling very sludgy mucky grease her palms. "You'd better make this good, or I am so going to kick your ass."

So many deaths on top of failure would just be too much to ask.

* * *

Ianto came to tasting blood and smelling smoke, a deep, throbbing ache in his gut making it feel like he was being very slowly sawed in half. It was then he heard an odd noise, like someone bunching up great handfuls of cellophane, and, distantly, screams. Screams and alarms, while the Earth beneath him shuddered in revulsion.

Cybermen. Lisa.

Awareness, as sudden as cold water, forced his eyes open, and the resulting reflexive jerk of his muscles made something in his hand spark pain, bright bursts that made him bite back a scream. He seemed to have awoken in Hell.

Smoke curled in great grey ribbons towards what was left of the floors above, the angry flames chewing at the edges of his vision giving off a reddish-orange glow that felt like anger. The first breath he took hurt his lungs and made him cough as he blinked tears from his eyes and attempted to sit up amongst rubble, and had the memories come rushing back as he realized the heavy weight pinning his legs was Lisa. Or mostly Lisa.

She had some Cyber converted armor on, something ludicrous and frankly mad, he wanted to rip it off her, but he knew it was a part of her now or some such thing, and to do that would be to hurt her. He already hurt her enough ripping her out of the conversion unit he found her in, her blood spurting across his hands as he ripped out the snaking IVs and wires that attached her to the metal framework, her screams of pain bringing tears, making him involuntarily sob as he struggled to drag her out of there before the Cybermen – busy fighting what little was left of the Torchwood resistance – noticed someone had taken one of their captured people. Lisa had been fighting them; she was lucky she wasn't killed outright.

(Or was she?)

As he moved there was a pain in him so deep he almost passed out. It was sharp and dark, a blade of shadows that seemed to stab deep into his brain stem, and he figured in a strangely dispassionate part of his mind that he had some kind of internal injury, maybe something bad. But he didn't have time for it, so he shoved it aside. Did he want to live? Did he want to save Lisa? Then he would ignore everything and _get the fuck up._

As he struggled to his feet, he remembered what must have happened. They were on an emergency staircase, and it must have collapsed. He was probably lucky that they were still alive and didn't break their legs. He had to shift Lisa to free his intact legs though, and he was heartened that she was alive, just unconscious. He felt a shift in his equilibrium as he moved, and he almost passed out, but a dagger of sudden pain kept him awake. His left hand hurt really badly; it was just molten with pain. When he used it to shift rubble, he felt bones grinding together. Broken? Possibly.

He got up, although time had taken weird leaps and shifts, or maybe it was just his perception of it. The chemical taste in the air – along with the smell – was pungent, and just added to his sense of lightheadedness. The smoke probably didn't help.

He couldn't lift her, she was too heavy – it felt like she had been filled with metal, which wasn't possible, and yet she was easily three times the weight she had been this morning. He wasn't sure what that meant, he didn't want to know, it just left him with no choice but to drag her. His hand hurt so much he thought it might fall off, but it was just another thing to ignore, to set aside. Did he want to save her or not? _Then just do it, you pathetic piece of shit. _

He got maybe ten meters before he had to stop and cough, or rather gag, and ended up spitting up blood like a beaten boxer. Something was wrong with him, something inside him was broken, but he couldn't stop. He let the world around him tilt and settle, and then he grabbed her shoulders again and resumed trying to drag her out of the building before it collapsed on top of them. Which it would, he was certain. Sparks salted down from the ceiling like an inconstant hellish rain, and occasionally there were huge booms far above, followed by the building vibrating belatedly from the noise and force. How many people were still alive? He wondered if anyone he knew in this sprawling complex had survived; maybe they were the lucky ones, maybe they got out with the first evacuation signal.

As soon as Ianto heard it go off, he – like everyone else in the research department - couldn't believe it. He'd been at his computer, trying to match up a photo of a UFO spotted over Loch Lomond to any other known alien craft in the database, when the klaxon just started screaming. His supervisor, Glynnis Davidson, just stared up at the ceiling in shock as Cyril asked if it was a fire alarm. Glynnis just shook her head slowly, and for a notorious dragon lady, she had a curiously naked and scared look on her face. "It's the siege alarm," she finally said. "We're under attack."

A stage four siege alarm, to be precise. That meant everyone who could evacuate should evacuate, while everyone else was to grab a weapon and fight. Or do both, if at all possible. Glynnis emptied the floor, telling them all to get out, while thundering booms and screams started becoming audible from the upper floors. All he could think was Lisa was up there – as she was; she was generally on the twentieth floor – and as the research unit was headed down, he broke away and ran up an emergency stairwell. He thought he heard Glynnis shout his name, but he honestly didn't know.

Along the way, Ianto found a dead body in the southwestern stairwell of the nineteenth floor, a man with most of his face missing; it was just a charred ruin, with a couple of holes where eyes and a mouth may have once been. He felt bile rise in his throat, especially when he saw that it still wore a white coat and a security badge, identifying him as somebody in the Science Division (Edgar Wong – Ianto had no idea why, but he memorized his name, feeling someone should remember him). He also had a gun in his hands, although not an Earth gun. He recognized it from the database, a Dogon laser pistol, and while he had no idea how you used one, Ianto pried it out of his hand and studied it quickly. It had half a charge left, and he found what was most likely the firing mechanism, so he gripped it tightly as he continued up to the twentieth floor.

His mind seemed to shy away from remembering much of what he saw. It was hell. It was blood and charred flesh on the walls, it was screaming and a smell like burned wires, it was shadows moving near broken light fixtures and sparks erupting from yanked out wires that poured out of holes in the wall like spilled entrails.

He followed red lights and noise to the area where the Cybermen were "converting" captured Humans. There was noise on the other side of the room, somewhere beyond the protective plastic sheeting put up by the construction crews, and it sounded like energy discharges, cursing and yelling, and the thud of Cybermen footsteps. Some of the Torchwood active soldiers were still alive, and trying to breech the room – he had inadvertently come in through the back. In an odd way, he'd gotten lucky.

He spotted Lisa almost right away, and set about freeing her, deciding he could try and free anyone else who looked alive once he got her out of there. But Lisa screamed as he ripped her out of the conversion unit, and a Cyberman came back in, heading straight for them. Ianto lifted the pistol with a shaking, bloody hand and fired.

The kickback nearly ripped his arm off at the socket, and the gun went flying out of his hand. Still, the laser blast caught the Cyberman on the side of his head, and it burned away half of his face in one quick sizzle. It stood there for one grotesque moment before listing like a crippled ship and hitting the floor with a solid thud.

They knew he was here, and they knew he had Lisa. He had no chance to try and free anyone else, as they had to get out as soon as possible. Ianto was sorry he lost the gun, but he couldn't use it, not with her, and besides, his arm still ached from the discharge. That thing kicked like a bull with a grudge. How strong were the Dogons? The funny thing was the pistol was made of some kind of plastic, and it weighed less than a paperback. How could such a little thing have so much power?

But how could these frankly rubbish looking robots kill almost all of Torchwood? There was much in the universe that Humans weren't meant to understand.

He caught a whiff of fresh air amongst the miasma of burned insulation, and realized he was on the ground floor. Couldn't be long now. He just had to go a little farther.

He heard a heavy footfall, and his heart sunk as a Cyberman appeared before them, blocking their way. "You will be upgraded," it said in a flat monotone. It wasn't actually a proper Cyberman – there were gaps in its half completed armor where you could see flesh. It was a 75% converted Human, one of his co-workers perhaps.

An involuntary sob of frustration escaped Ianto, but looking around he saw a pipe sticking up from a pile of rubble, and letting Lisa go, he grabbed it. It was hot to the touch, so hot he could feel it instantly burn off the skin from his palms, but he used the sharp pain to fuel his anger and didn't drop it. "Bastards!" he screamed, almost hysterical, and smashed it as hard as he could in the side of the head.

The head was mostly covered with armor, and despite the fact that he'd hit it hard enough that it would have been an instantly fatal blow to a Human, it barely made it turn its head.

Red rage was filling Ianto's vision, to the point where he wasn't thinking and he wasn't feeling, and it was the kindest bit of peace he'd had in his entire life. It was insanity, lovely and dark, and he wanted it. It would be so nice just to let go. With an inarticulate scream of rage, he rammed the pipe into its head, straight through a half completed eye socket. There was resistance, and it didn't come out of the back of its head, but not for lack of trying. Ianto had shoved it against the wall, and kept shoving, even though it wouldn't go any further, even though the pain in his left hand was almost nuclear now.

Blood was trickling out the pipe, splattering on his leg, and finally he'd come back to himself enough that he backed up, letting go of the pipe. The Cyberman just stood there, blood draining out of its head, and finally it reached up and grabbed the pipe. It started pulling it out with a sickening noise like someone pulling a boot out of the mud, and muttered the word "Upgraded -" like some daffy parrot. It had gotten the pipe most of the way out when it fell over, landing on its side, the pipe keeping it from flopping onto its face. Blood started to form an oily pool around its head like a fallen halo.

Bile burned his throat as tears burned his eyes, but he had no time to think about anything. In fact, he didn't want to think. He wasn't going to think.

Save Lisa. All he had to do was save Lisa, and everything was going to be all right. No matter what happened, as long as he saved her, all would be right with the world.

He grabbed her by the shoulders and started dragging her towards the emergency exit, ignoring the fact that the Cyberman's hand was still twitching and flopping on the ground like a landed fish drowning in open air.

He was going to save her, and everything was going to be okay.


	13. Chapter 13

13

Jack hated leaving Gwen to handle the Weevils alone, but he didn't see that he had much choice, not if he wanted to try and save Ianto.

He had his secret weapon – his only weapon, really – hidden in the high security vault. Once, back when Ianto was rather new, he was doing an audit of the inventory in it, and found the unmarked case, which had no number or description in the database. The case couldn't be opened, although it had many warnings that you shouldn't even think about trying to open it. Ianto brought it to his attention and asked about it. Jack told him he couldn't tell him about it, and he didn't want it in any official records either. Ianto asked why, and Jack was forced to ask him to trust him, that this was technology that they weren't supposed to have yet and could be very dangerous in the wrong hands – or any hands. He didn't want it noted or used, period. It was Ianto's first test, or at least the first one Jack honestly put him through, and he passed it – he left it out of the inventory, returned it to its hiding place, and never mentioned it again.

He hoped Ianto had totally forgotten about it, because he didn't want Strain to see it coming.

Jack retrieved the case from behind a storage crate full of loose Cybermen and Dalek pieces – arms, torso plating, a refraction crystal – and touched a control on his wrist band. The small silver box unlatched with a click. The whole trick of the box was it could only be opened by a Time Agent – it was Time Agent technology. How it got through the Rift he had no idea, but he was glad the security protocols held, because in other hands – or loose on their own – they'd have been a nightmare.

Inside the box was what looked like a sealed ammunition cartridge, half metal and half translucent. It looked small and fragile, but it wasn't; it was made of a special alloy that would adapt to pressure and force. There was no way to muscle it apart. Jack tucked it in his pocket and returned to the Hub.

He went to the autopsy room, and found the blood samples of Torchwood employees. He took out Ianto's test tube, and wondered, with a sad twinge, why Owen's and Tosh's samples hadn't been archived. He assumed Ianto had done it, but maybe he just hadn't brought himself to do it. He closed their employee files, cleaned up their computers – maybe this was too much. Gwen probably knew about this too, but she hadn't moved the blood samples either.

Touching another control on his wrist, the cartridge opened with a tiny click and hiss. It was a stasis field releasing along with the container. Jack emptied the contents into a petri dish, although there was nothing to see except the tiniest sparkle. He then added about a teaspoon of Ianto's blood, and hit his wrist control once more, seeing a response in the slightest ripple of blood. "Come on," he muttered, trying to watch it in action even though he knew he couldn't see anything without an electron microscope.

What was in the dish – and in Ianto's blood sample – was a special kind of nanite. Around the Time Agency, it was known as Atom Smasher, and spoken of with the kind of reverential fear usually saved for planetary core destabilizers. It was one of the worst weapons ever invented, although it didn't start out as a weapon. It actually began as something beneficial, something that would replace the immuno-boosters, but it was far too good at its job. It could break down and build up anything at the molecular level ... a little too well. People who wanted more muscles came out with almost ninety eight percent muscle tissue, something hideous and lumpen. It could be programmed specifically, but was considered a waste of resources in that department. It was considered of better use as a weapon.

With no template, it would simply break the molecular structure of whatever biological entity it encountered. It would split DNA like it was the most basic mathematical problem. In seconds a person would be reduced to quivering jelly, some kind of protein based protoplasm. It was nasty, it was unstoppable, it was a hundred percent deadly.

But it could be programed.

Programming was a delicate process though, and he had no idea what condition these Atom Smashers were in when they first came through the Rift. If hard radiation damaged them in some way, or if they had been specially made to resist programming (there was that kind), this wouldn't work. All he would do was kill Ianto quickly, and as painlessly as possible. Maybe that was all he could give him.

Or maybe he had a way to kill Strain. It all depended on how this worked. He could only hope it learned Ianto's exact DNA signature, and kept it in mind.

Because really, in all honesty, he had no other way to stop it.

* * *

**Aboard the Macaram Starflower**

The grin Skylar was giving him was unsettling. It was plastic, artificial, and seemed to be in direct contradiction to the message sent by his eyes, which was molten death. If he wasn't possessed by an alien intelligence, he would have said he was insane ... and he might still be. Who was to say alien intelligences couldn't be insane? Jack was sure he'd encountered at least three. Well, four, but one of them was harmless.

Skylar wasn't harmless. "What have you done with him?" Jack demanded.

That insane look remained. "With who? Be more specific."

"Skylar!"

He laughed in a cold, somehow condescending manner. "Idiot. He's dead; he's been dead for ages. Don't feel too bad, Time Agent, you never actually knew him. He was dead long before we met you."

His stomach twisted and burned. It could be lying to him – it was probably lying to him – but he had a sneaking suspicion it was being honest, if only because it explained all the unusual things that Skylar didn't seem to know. How to mingle, for example, how to act amongst people he didn't know. It wasn't usual to him, or his species. "We? How many of there are you?"

"We are one; we are many. We are legion."

"Cut the bullshit."

"Turning up the air scrubbers is a cute trick, but it won't work. Limit our range, we shorten our range."

"Yeah, I figured that."

Jack kept his expression deliberately blank, and after a moment, Sky's eyes narrowed, and some of the gloating arrogance disappeared. "Meaning what? What have you done?"

"Can't you guess? I thought you were smarter than me." He gasped in mock horror. "Was that a lie too? Gosh, I don't know if I can trust you anymore, Sky."

Sky didn't look amused; he looked disgusted. Good. "There's no way off this ship until we get to Ygala, and there's no way in hell you're gonna live that long. You are outnumbered and trapped, Jack, or whatever your name actually is. Shoot me if you want, but I -"

And Jack did. He shot him high in the upper chest, the bolt of energy tearing through him like he was wet paper and throwing him back against the bathroom door. He looked disbelieving and horrified as he slid down to the floor, mouth opening and closing like a fish drowning in air. "Wh-what -"

"You think I'm an idiot; I get that. You're a mass murdering life form; I get that too. But I will die before I allow any of you to set foot on Ygala. Is that clear? Do you need more convincing?"

The blood pouring from the wound looked Human red, which wasn't a total surprise, but he expected something to hint at the alien within. Sky touched the wound and looked at the blood on his hand in a manner that indicated great curiosity – had he never seen his own blood before? Well, not his blood, but Skylar's blood. Same damn thing now, he supposed. "Wow, himbo, I didn't think you had it in you," Sky finally said. "Your balls must be bigger than they looked."

"What are you? You'd better start talking, or I'll see how many limbs I can take off before you die of shock."

Sky stared at him, as if trying to judge his veracity, and Jack didn't look away, simply met his glare with one of his own. Finally, Sky said, "You've got it all wrong, you know. You're mucking this up. They won't be happy with you at HQ."

He rolled his eyes, not bothering to hide his contempt. "Really? You're going this route? That's incredibly pathetic. I thought you sadistic masterminds had better plan Bs than that."

"You're fucking things up."

"That's the intention."

Sky shook his head, and a look of impatience made his face look sour. "No, you moron. We're on the same side. We work for the Time Agency."


	14. Chapter 14

14

Jack was beginning to wonder if Strain had developed subtlety in all this time, when finally he saw on the monitors that Ianto had entered the tourism office above the Hub. It was about time, but of course Strain would want to dawdle – the longer it inhabited Ianto, the more it killed him. It might have been taking its time simply as insurance.

Jack draped his coat over his chair and left his office to meet it downstairs in the Hub proper. He sat on the staircase and waited, nervously adjusting his wrist strap. Maybe it was too late; maybe he was kidding himself. But he wanted to believe there was still time to save him.

He didn't bother to stand up when the cog wheel of the door rolled aside, he just remained where he was. When Ianto/Strain walked in, he felt the smallest contraction in his chest, a muscle spasming briefly. It might be too late already; this might be for nothing. But at least he'd figured out something about Strain in the meantime.

"Not even standing up to greet me? Where are your manners?" Strain taunted, in his flat, emotionless tone that was nowhere near Ianto's real voice. He missed the lyrical Welsh accent, the dry but brutal sarcasm. He wanted to ask if he was still alive in there, but there was no way for the real Ianto to answer him.

Jack just stared at him. "Ever get tired of being smug? Was that programmed into you, or did you just pick it up on your own?"

"I got it from you, I imagine." He then gave him a humorless smile. "So, are you gonna blow the place up again? You have such a limited repertoire."

"It's kind of a shock, isn't it? An advanced organism discovering life in the past is too hard for it."

The smug look on his face started to crack. "Don't you have a therapist you can discuss your inadequacies with?"

"Things are so clean – generally – in the fiftieth century. Most diseases are history; we don't expose ourselves to harsh chemicals and toxic pollutants. Hell, I didn't even know fried cheese sticks existed until I came here. Have you had those? Heart attack on a greasy plate, but damn, they're almost worth it."

He looked annoyed. "What the hell are you on about?"

"You should have taken over all of Cardiff now. But you haven't. This is a harder world to conquer than you thought, isn't it? Bit of a pisser. You're communications are already limited by the wind, weather pattern vagaries, cars driving by, but to be limited by chemicals and other, stronger viruses, that must be embarrassing."

His look became stony and evil, and it gave Jack a mild case of deja vu. "You've never been as smart as you think, Jack. You -" he paused and reflectively flinched as he looked up and saw the pteranodon drifting above them on a current of air. "Why is it out?"

"She likes Ianto, you know. Associates him with chocolate. I wonder how she'd react if she realized he smelled wrong."

"You're bluffing. You won't watch your boy toy get torn to pieces by a dinosaur."

"Ianto's dead, isn't he? He's gone, and you're just inhabiting his body. I can live with you getting torn to pieces by a dinosaur. In fact, I think I'd rather enjoy that."

He shook his head, lips thinned and taut, but now doubt was creeping into his cold eyes. They did have a past together, and Jack had killed him once. Why not again? "This is bullshit. What does this gain you, Jack?"

He whistled sharply, and the pteranodon responded to it like a dog, letting out a responding shriek and circling lower. Strain looked up, now really nervous, and there was genuine fear on his face when he said, "Stop it. He's not dead yet."

"You'd say anything to save yourself. The other infested are dying, you know. I sent the Weevils after them. And since I don't have any Weevils willing to work with me here, all I have is her. She'll probably be more merciful, really. Kill you quicker than the Weevils."

Now he saw it all: shock, fear, arrogance. Apparently viruses were capable of genuine emotion, in certain circumstances. "The Weevils? Those stupid animals? They don't work for you."

"No, but they hate you even more than us. I gave them a license to kill, and believe me, they grabbed it with both hands."

"You cold blooded bastard. Your people have no idea how ruthless you are, do they? They don't know how Time Agent is a polite way of saying judge, jury, and executioner."

He flashed him a cold, hard smile. "You know better than anyone, Strain, in the survival game, all bets are off." Strain – Sky – had said that to him, back on the ship, so many damn years in the future.

The look he gave him could have stripped the flesh off his bones if he'd been a Loxorian, but since he was in a Human, it was only a dirty look. Sweat trickled down his forehead, and suddenly he dropped to one knee, his shoulders collapsing as he seemed to sag forward. Jack hoped this meant what he thought it did and wasn't a bluff. He stood, but stayed on the step until Ianto seemed to right himself before he hit the floor, and yes, it was him. The look of utter disorientation and terror were too Human to be faked. "Jack?" Ianto asked, and his eyes had a wild quality he hadn't seen since the whole Lisa incident. It wasn't just desperation – it was a single step away from madness.

"Ianto." Thank whatever entity you wanted, he was still hanging in there. He knew he was too damn stubborn to give up so easily. But he looked like he was about to break. Whatever Strain was doing to him, it was torture.

Tears welled in his eyes, and his voice seemed about to crack as he said, "I can't do this anymore; I can't live this anymore. Kill me. Kill us. We -" Ianto's head snapped back as Strain reasserted control, and Jack lunged for him, as now was the time to move. Strain was most vulnerable here, in the moment between change.

Jack had hidden the hypodermic up his sleeve. He let it drop into his hand as he moved, and jammed the needle down into Ianto's carotid artery.

It was a split second, but Strain was already back, and almost instantly swatted him away, like a Human would swat a fly. Jack went flying, slamming into a lower riser before falling into the water. And of course he had to land on his keys.

He sat up, the cold water making him gasp, as Strain pulled the needle out and threw it aside. "Drugs? Drugs won't work on me."

"Not drugs. Tell me, has your ability to fight machines gotten any better?"

Horror blossomed in Strain's eyes before the nanobots started tearing him apart at the molecular level. "Not ... how do ... they don't exist yet!"

"Neither do you or I. Time travel's a bitch, isn't it?"

He collapsed to his knees and his eyes seemed to glaze over as the nanobots worked their destructive magic.

Jack just watched, his stomach tying in knots, as he waited to see if they would kill Ianto too.

* * *

**On The Macaram Starflower**

"Bullshit!" Jack snapped, unable to believe the gall of this bastard. "You are not with the Time Agency!"

"Who do you think created me?" Sky -or whoever it was - replied, smirking like the universe's smuggest bastard. "OmniMundus was hired by the Time Agency to create something that would enhance or replace the current immuno-boosters, with the added bonus of a built in nanny system that agents like you can't simply avoid or get rid of. And what better than a semi-intelligent virus?"

Here was the problem – that kind of made sense. The Time Agency wasn't above ruthlessness, not even with its own people. "But a virus can spread. It's not an ideal delivery system."

"Correct. They were working on that, on a way of neutering it, stopping its ability to spread within an hour of infection. But were we going to stand for that? Hardly."

"They made you too smart."

"They seemed to think we were idiots, some cold virus scraped off a tissue. But we were smarter than some of their designers, and we hitched a ride out of there, to use a colonial colloquialism. They've been trying to hunt us down ever since, without admitting they're even responsible for us. That's why you're here, isn't it?"

Jack glared at him. No, that wasn't why he was sent ... unless they sent him without telling him the assignment. Which was exactly what they did. "How long do the others have? The others infested."

Sky smirked. "They're all dead and you know it. But you just realized it, didn't you?"

He wasn't going to give him the satisfaction, but a cold feeling settled in his stomach and seemed to bleed through his body. Had it actually come to this? It could be lying; in fact, he had no reason to believe it wasn't. So why was it so goddamn believable? "Realized what?"

"That they sent you on a suicide mission. That the Time Agency wants you dead, Jack." He smiled then, but it was nasty, all teeth and graveyard humor. "And that I'm supposed to kill you."


	15. Chapter 15

15

**Aboard the Macaram Starflower**

While he could easily believe that the Time Agency would be happy to see the back of him, he couldn't quite believe they'd have sent him on this mission to die. (Not without being able to watch it.) Jack shook his head. "Nice try, Sky. Or whatever your name is. Do you even have a name?"

Sky was still bleeding, blood leaking through his fingers, and he still seemed more amused by it than anything. Did he feel pain? Maybe he didn't, or maybe he felt it in another way. Hard to tell with some beings. "We don't need a name. We're simply Strain. What's your name, Jack? Your real name. Who are you hiding from?"

Was this its best gambit? Maybe. His wrist controller bleeped at him, a reminder that he was running out of time. "I'm a dead man from a dead family and a dead world. I'm whatever and whoever I choose to be." The lights flickered briefly, and the normally inaudible hum of the ship's engines suddenly became audible. You could feel the engine thrumming through the deck.

Sky suddenly went from looking smug to looking curiously worried. "What was that?"

He shrugged. "Damned if I know. Maybe we should ask the Captain."

Sky glared at him, his eyes dark with a powerful, inhuman hatred. "What have you done?"

Jack started backing towards the door, gun still trained on Sky. "Got an appointment. I'm afraid you and your people are gonna hafta play amongst yourselves."

Sky struggled to his feet, his hand smearing bloody prints on the wall, mouth twisted into an ugly glower. How had he ever thought he was attractive? (Well, okay, he did have a hot ass.) "You're not getting off this ship alive."

"And neither are you," he replied nonchalantly. "May the best creature win, huh?" His wrist control bleeped one last warning, and Jack opened the door to his cabin as a massive explosion rocked the entire ship, sending Sky slamming face first into the opposite wall. Jack managed to grab onto the door jamb and just barely managed to keep his feet as a loud warning klaxon began to scream over the comm system and the artificial gravity briefly fluxed, leaving him with the momentary sensation of having his stomach flipped with esophagus. But at least he'd had enough training to not lose his lunch (this time).

Sky was back on the floor but sitting up now, blood streaming down his face from a broken nose, and rage warred with disbelief across his features. "What the hell – what have you done?!"

"I think the old Human term for it is scuttling. I've scuttled the ship, Strain. We'll never reach Ygala now; we're not going anywhere ever. Not with the main plasma conduits blown like overloaded circuits."

Now he looked shocked. "The power relays -"

"Oh, they're dead. How much back up power do you think we have left? I know it's regulation to have enough to go for forty nine hours, but that's only if -" his computer issued a different warning beep, this time a tiny trill, before another deep boom echoed through the ship, making it vibrate like an enormous bell. There was a slight sense of sideways movement before the artificial gravity – what was left it – compensated for the directional shift. " - you actually have a power generator. Which we no longer do."

A different alarm started screaming through the ship, this time with the synthesized female voice of the computer, judged to be the most calming, announcing in the seven main languages of the Central Worlds that the hull had been breached, and anyone below decks or on tiers twenty through fourteen should immediately evacuate to the higher decks. Sky listened, glaring at him the entire time. "You idiot!"

"No, I'm not an idiot, I'm a jackass. Get it right." Jack started down the hall, aware of the countdown on his wrist computer. The digits were flying by, counting off his remaining time in minutes quickly dissolving into seconds. The problem with this plan, the main one that his Time Agency superiors would have immediately had a problem with, was there was no room for error. If he wasn't right about everything, he had just committed suicide.

But hey, the uncertainty made it fun, right? The thrill was in the doubt.

He was only half way down the corridor, now filled with shadows thanks to the blood red emergency lighting, when Sky stumbled out the door, still bleeding and still angry. This proved that he had superhuman abilities, simply because a true Human would have been too weak and dizzy to stand. "You've killed yourself too, Jack. What does this gain you? What is the point?"

"The point is I'm a poor sport, Strain. If I can't win, you can't win either, even if I have to destroy the game board. Maybe you didn't study my files as much as you should have."

"You're the one who hasn't thought this through. The emergency beacon is sounding. Someone will come."

"No. Protocol dictates that all power be diverted to life support if the need becomes critical." Another blast, this one even louder, shook the ship like a carnival ride, sending Jack crashing into a wall, but he kept his balance and because he was expecting it, managed to not smash into it face first. Sky, who wasn't ready, was thrown across the corridor and met a wall head first. He collapsed to the floor but hadn't passed out. The ship's computer was now reporting a critical oxygen loss. In case Strain didn't grasp the implications of this, he shouted, over the din of alarms, "And now that the oxygen supply has been vented into space and the converters were destroyed in the explosion that took out the plasma conduits, I'm thinking the ship will divert power away from the beacon. But I could be wrong ..."

"You vented the oxygen?" This was horror, a new emotion from Strain. "That's impossible! Safety protocols -"

"Prevent it? Yeah, but the Time Agency has a way of getting around that. But you're Time Agency, right? You should have known that. Well, I'd love to stay and chat, but since the ship is undergoing catastrophic cascade failure, I think it's best we save it for later." This deck was sealed off, as were all the decks up to eleven, the emergency blast and quarantine shielding already brought down per his instructions. Far down the corridor, barely visible thanks to the low light, was the black expanse of a emergency shield door. It would hold in what oxygen was left, but even if he assumed that half of Strain's people were vented out into space when the hull breach occurred, it didn't leave him with a lot of time. He figured he'd have five minutes of usable oxygen (seven if he didn't mind it thin and a bit tainted), and then suffocation would start in earnest. Not a lot of time to get to get to section four, tier eleven, but enough if he hurried.

Jack looked up to make sure he was in the right spot, and Sky must have guessed he was up to something, because he struggled up to his feet and started running for him. "Code three," Jack shouted, hoping the ship could hear him over the noise.

It did. The forcefield flared into blue-white life inches in front of him, and Sky hit it and rebounded off it before the metal door grew out of the wall and slammed into the groove on the opposite wall, making an airtight seal. All the hallways were capable of being sealed off – end section, middle section, and front section – as part of emergency protocol three. Jack had his computer make sure the ship would only take audio orders from him; it was now cued to his voice alone. So Sky and the rest of his Strain family could scream their lungs out, but the ship would be, in effect, deaf to them. They were static, random input, junk data; they were to be ignored. This was the only way Jack had a prayer of living through this, and guaranteeing that Strain didn't. They had a number advantage against him, but he who controlled the ship controlled the world.

They really shouldn't have killed the Captain. If they hadn't, this never would have occurred to him.

He ran to the end of the section, hitting the emergency release button that opened the access hatch built into the wall besides the now dead lift. It was actually a maintenance access that had a recessed ladder built into the side, and through it he could access the entirety of the ship – well, all of it that was still intact, and wasn't blocked by blast doors. He used it to quickly climb down to tier eleven, aware in the darkness of the maintenance system of a loud metallic groaning, the straining hull trying desperately to keep the ship together under contradictory forces. He hadn't told Sky everything. For instance, the main drive core wasn't destroyed; the power conduits were destroyed, meaning no power would go out to the rest of the ship, but the core was still there, and the power was still building. But the safety vent was jammed, so there would be no pressure release. Which meant that in seven minutes or so – might be nine, depending on how well built the core was – the pressure inside the core would become untenable, and it would burst, not so much destroying the ship as obliterating it. He might not actually have time to get a safe distance away; the blast might in fact kill him, even if he got off the ship. But he hadn't had a plethora of choices. It was go for the big gamble and assure the destruction of Strain, or play it safer and possibly allow one of them (or some of them – what was the plural of virus?) to escape. He couldn't allow that.

He really was a poor sport. As long as they died too, he wouldn't feel so bad about dying. Besides, the Time Agency just might be able to pull him out of another time stream, and he'd never die anyways.

There were escape pods on each tier, so Jack had to take care of those. He timed the system so it would launch all escape pods before blowing out the power conduits (that was the first bleep on his wrist controller, a confirmation of successful launch), so while Strain's people still had access to the ship, they couldn't get away. Of course that meant he couldn't get away either.

Except he knew from past experience that there was, in the main maintenance unit, an EVA suit for emergency outer hull repairs. It probably hadn't been used for fifty years, but every ship in the line had to have at least have one (some cruise ships had as many as three, but he didn't think the Starflower was that big) for the rare emergency situation. They weren't that far from Ygala, and all EVA suits had beacons in them – assuming the oxygen lasted and the suit wasn't breached by debris, he had a chance to live through this. Not a great chance, but hey, he'd take whatever chance he could get. He probably depended a little too much on his luck, but Jack already knew he was almost supernaturally lucky. If anyone else pointed it out, he'd scoff and say he made his own luck, but truth be told, sometimes it freaked him out a little. He sometimes wondered if his poor brother got all the bad luck and he got all the good. He knew it didn't work that way, couldn't work that way, but he still wondered.

He got out on tier eleven, crawling out of the maintenance hatch, and checked his wrist computer. He was down to time here, and he felt the ship shuddering as smaller explosive decompressions from weakened spots in the now damaged hull kept occurring. The hallway was sealed here, broken into sections, so Jack got no nasty surprises on his way to the main maintenance unit. It was starting to get uncomfortably warm though, superheated air from malfunctioning thermal control units bleeding into the atmosphere. This is what it felt like when a ship was dying, and it was as awful as killing a living being. He wanted to pat the wall and apologize to the old girl, but that was just idiotic, and he shoved the impulse away.

The EVA suit was inside a closet with the emergency fire suppression gear, and he was in luck, as it was one of those armored EVA suits, which might make it more resistant to debris. He quickly stepped into it and pulled it on, just now noticing he was starting to pant for breath. The air was getting thin as well as warm.

Once he'd sealed the suit, the oxygen began feeding in from the attached tanks, and he automatically slaved suit controls to his wrist computer as he grabbed one of the hand held maneuvering engines (used by any crew member who had need to wear the EVA suit) and his gun, which he had remembered to take out at the last minute and put on a shelf. He set it to overload and tossed it inside the maintenance closet as he stepped out into the hall to wait.

It didn't take long. The explosion almost blasted the door off, and while the interior hull was technically intact, the second explosion – one of the hand held fire suppression units – was just too much, and a hole opened up. A pinhole quickly became a spaceship sized hole thanks to explosive decompression, and even though there was danger of debris collision, Jack just let it take him, fling him outside the ship like an unwanted passenger.

He spun head over heels into the blackness, chunks of the ship and remaining gear spreading out around him (he heard the impact of collisions, his computer flashing details on the head's up display inside the faceplate, but there were no breaches and none of the impacts were even remotely serious), until the units built into the suit stabilized him, and he was able to feel like he was falling in one steady direction, letting inertia keep moving him forward. Well, it was all relative – in space, you could fall in any direction, and certainly his reeling equilibrium wasn't sure which way he was moving, but according to the HUD he was moving away from the ship, and that was all that mattered.

He had just finished swallowing back bile, only now relatively sure he wasn't going to vomit, when the comm unit crackled to life in his ear. "Did you really think we'd be that easy to kill?"

Skylar.

Jack turned carefully, and saw another person in an EVA suit coming straight for him, like a shark in the ocean.


	16. Chapter 16

16

Precisely how smart were Weevils?

Before this, Gwen knew she wouldn't have even been able to guess. They had some intelligence she supposed, but she would have classified it in the animal category. Now, she would put it higher, but in a category she could never understand. To say it was alien was almost an understatement; she couldn't even begin to wrap her head around their thought processes. But they were in intelligent in some way, of that she was sure.

Eventually two specific Weevils started watching her, keeping her back while the rest of the Weevils took care of the victims infested with Strain. She didn't like that, especially since she had no guarantee of Strain infection with some of them (except displays of superhuman strength – when that eighty year old woman picked up that fourteen stone Weevil and tossed him like a tin can, that was a good sign she wasn't precisely Human anymore). But they outnumbered her, and were they scared of her? No bloody way. She could wave around her gun and her Weevil spray, and she may as well have been waving around a newspaper. They didn't care.

And almost as suddenly as the madness started, it stopped. After the last victim, they stood around sniffing for about a minute, and then descended back into the sewers. When she attempted to follow, they growled at her. So they got them all? Or did they just not want her around for the next ones?

She didn't care, to be honest. She returned to the Hub boiling mad at Jack. How could he abandon her to that, to being helpless at a Weevil slaughter? He hadn't given up on saving Ianto, so why had he given up on all the rest of them?

The first thing she saw upon entering the Hub was the pteranodon on the far side of the water tower, eating a pizza, tearing it apart with its beak and carefully gulping what looked to be still hot pizza. Jack didn't give it pizza except rarely, as a treat. She took this as a bad sign. The second bad sign was Jack's coat on the back of a chair (Tosh's chair; she couldn't help but still think of it still as Tosh's chair), wet and dripping onto the floor. Jack himself was up in the medical unit, or so she suspected, as its light was on, spilling onto the upper level of the Hub. "Jack," she called, climbing the stairs.

"In here," he called back needlessly. His voice had an oddly flat tone that wasn't encouraging.

Her overwhelming anger at Jack died as soon as she saw Ianto laid out on one of the medical beds, looking as still as a corpse, although the readouts over the bed said he was alive. "Strain?" she asked.

Jack was pacing, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbows, that vein in his temple – the one that appeared whenever Jack encountered a problem he couldn't solve - mildly pulsing. "Dead. I trust the Weevils took care of the rest of them."

"They did, as far as I can tell. What's wrong with Ianto? I thought you said he'd be fine as soon as Strain was gone."

"He should have been." He sighed in frustration, crossing his arms over his chest and casting a worried glance at Ianto. "He should have come back to us as soon as Strain was dead. But he didn't." He rubbed the back of his neck, and frowned at the floor, as if not daring to look at Ianto. He turned away, muttering under his breath, "Revenge."

"What?"

"Revenge. Strain let me think Ianto was still in there, but ... I don't think he was. Or Strain made sure it had rewired enough of his brain to make sure that if it died, Ianto wouldn't regain consciousness."

Gwen went to his bedside and touched Ianto's cheek. She almost expected him to feel cold, but he was tepid, as warm as he should have been. "You're skiving, aren't you?" she teased, really trying to make herself believe it. "You just want to give Jack a heart attack."

But of course there was no response; not even the bleeps of the monitors changed. The readouts remained steady as she looked at them.

They weren't going to lose him like this, were they? She tried to imagine Torchwood as just her and Jack, and couldn't. They could barely keep going as a trio; as a duo, they'd be far too overwhelmed. "There must be something we can do for him."

Jack frowned, and looked as miserable as she had ever seen him. "I'm not sure. It depends on how much damage has been done."

"Well, let's find out. Come on!" This felt good, deciding on a course of action. It made her feel useful, like she was actually helping Ianto when in fact she was doing nothing of the sort.

"I'm not sure how," he snapped, and for a brief second, a cold, sharp anger passed across his face. When Jack got truly angry, it was a frightening thing to witness. It reminded you that for all his bravado, bluster, and innuendo, he could be almost insanely dangerous. They were all lucky he was technically a good guy. (Technically. Although she did wonder from time to time how good he actually was.)

"There's nothing in all of Torchwood? Really?"

He ran a hand through his hair, still avoiding her gaze, and finally admitted, "There may be something in the vault."

"Dangerous?"

"He doesn't have a lot to lose."

That was an answer that was no answer, and yet also exceedingly depressing.

Jack left the room and she followed, telling him, "I expect you to tell me what Strain is getting revenge for, Jack."

His back stiffened, but he hardly paused as he continued down the stairs and headed for the vault.

Considering the secret had almost killed a good portion of Cardiff, an answer was the least he could offer.

* * *

Ianto found himself sitting in the back booth of a pub called the Fox and Hound, which was a jarring mix of old fashioned pub and fern bar. There was dark lighting, beer stained wood, and dark leather, but there was also a glass topped bar and a wine rack visible over the bartender's shoulder. He wasn't sure what to make of this place or its odd clientèle (a couple of career drinkers, those lumpy men in their duffel coats who seemed to anchor themselves at the end of a bar and never leave, mixed uncomfortably with yuppie types in expensive suits, trying to ignore kids who may have been hoping to sneak a pint without being carded), but it seemed appropriate somehow that Toshiko would bring him here.

For what seemed like the third week in a row, they'd been left back at the Hub while everyone else ran off, guns blazing. They reported to the others, giving them field intell, hacking computer systems, cutting CCTV cameras, interrupting electrical systems, cutting off avenues of escape, tracking down crucial pieces of information that allowed Jack, Gwen, and Owen to seemingly save the day at the last minute. Not that they were jealous ... okay, perhaps a bit. It just seemed like everyone else got to have most of the adventure and the glory, and they got stuck doing the scut work. Is that why Tosh asked him if he wanted to go get a pint, and more importantly, is that why he accepted? He didn't know; it was just that a beer sounded like a nice idea.

Tosh was sitting across from him, smiling in that sort of awkward way. "Remember your reaction when I asked you to tell me something about you? I think deer in the headlights was an appropriate description. Why were you so afraid of telling me something about yourself? I mean, this was after the whole Lisa thing, so your biggest secret was out there."

He looked at her in confusion. This wasn't how the conversation began. He put down his pint and sighed. "Strain. Cute."

"Oh, I'm not Strain. Strain's dead. Can't you tell?"

Was this a trick? But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he did feel different. He actually felt alone in his mind, which was new. He was afraid it might be a trick and concentrated, which immediately made him feel like an idiot. If Strain wanted to hide, there was no way he'd find him. "So if you're not Strain, who are you?"

"Toshiko."

"You're dead." Internally he winced at how baldly he stated that. He really liked Tosh; he was sad she was gone. He was sad about Owen too, but in a more abstract sense, as they never quite got on that well. But Tosh? Tosh was a sweetheart, and smarter than most people combined. How could you not like her? She was like the sister he never had.

"A representation of your unconscious, perhaps."

"Okay." That he could almost buy. "Do you have a message for me, some wisdom I've been ignoring ..?"

"Beyond 'Don't fall for Jack, he'll just break your heart'?"

"Besides that, yes."

"Hmm." She sat back in her chair, thinking, tapping her pint glass with her fingernail. He was a bit surprised when she ordered a bitter, as Tosh always seemed a bit more delicate than that, but she sipped it daintily and made it seemed more civilized somehow. "That is a rather big one, you know."

"I know. But there's got to be more."

She nodded, lips compressing into a thin line. "You need to stop hating yourself."

"I don't. Anything else?"

"Don't lie to me. You're lying to yourself, and that never works."

"I don't hate myself."

"Then why aren't you fighting? Why have you given up?"

"I haven't."

"What did I tell you about lying to yourself?"

He closed his eyes and wondered if he could wish this away. He attempted to, but when he opened his eyes, Tosh was still sitting across from him, giving him a frosty look. No help for it, then. He sighed, and admitted, "I'm tired. Please tell me what you want and I'll give it to you."

"If I was Jack, I'd have so much fun with that remark."

"But you're not, you're me, and I don't make the smutty jokes. I make the dry, sarcastic comments."

"So you do." She barely paused. "What happened to Lisa wasn't your fault."

Without a word, he got up and walked out the door of the pub. He remembered this night quite well; it was strangely warm, humid, thick rainclouds threatening to unleash a torrent short of a monsoon but never quite committing to it. In spite of some awkward questions – Tosh did ask him about himself, away from work, and he didn't know what to tell her; he decided to admit his love of movies (that was harmless), and they ended up talking about Akira Kurosawa films for half the night – it turned out to be enjoyable. He got the sense that Tosh felt bad for him, perhaps pitied him (after that whole incident at the village, there might have also been a sense of debt, since he helped her escape), but it wasn't so overwhelming and obvious as to be obnoxious. In fact, after that night, if Tosh was going home alone after work to a DVD and a take away meal (which happened quite a bit), she'd always ask him for a movie recommendation. (The last movie he recommended she see was Pan's Labyrinth. He had no idea if she ever watched it or not. He had no idea why he even remembered that fact, why it had lodged in his brain with so many other bits of minutia that meant nothing to no one.)

But instead of stepping out into the Cardiff night, he left the pub to find himself entering the pub. He looked back in the doorway and found the pub behind him as well as in front of him. It was a Mobius strip of a pub, one that twisted in on itself in an impossible manner.

"Don't make this harder than it has to be," Tosh told him, not without sympathy.

A cold shock ran down Ianto's spine. Something was very wrong here, beyond the obvious. "What has it done?" he asked, hoping Tosh – his subconscious – would have the answer he didn't have. "What's happened to me?"

The look Tosh gave him was full of pity, and his gut knotted in response. Oh, this was bad.


	17. Chapter 17

17

In retrospect, she had no idea what she expected to Jack to come back with.

He ran off to the vault, leaving her to look after Ianto, although he needed no looking after. Coma victims were generally peaceable sorts; not wild party or fit throwers. They kept to themselves and made excellent neighbors.

It was at that point she thought she was cracking up. She sat down on the edge of an empty bed, and told him, "In a way, I envy you. I think I'd rather be unconscious right now." A joke really, dark sarcasm, and she winced at hearing herself saying it, but she knew Ianto would have found it funny. Did that make it better?

She put together pieces in her head, or tried to, and realized there were gaps. Maybe it was her lingering cop nature, the desire to tie up all loose ends and have the evidence fit the crime, but there were some things that just didn't make sense.

When Jack returned, hefting a copper case just slightly smaller than your average footlocker, she asked, "When was Ianto infected, and how?"

He dropped the case with a heavy thump. It looked copper, but now under the lights of the medical bay she could see it had a softer, strange look. It was some kind of metal though, wasn't it? "The Weevils. A very misguided member of the Strain family inadvertently ended up infesting a Weevil. It pissed off the Weevils – hence the Tuesday night riot – and the Strain was desperate to get out, as a Weevil's system will generally kill any bugs in short order. So when the Weevil bit Ianto it jumped."

She nodded. Okay, that made sense. Well, a sort of sense. She watched as Jack crouched by the case and started undoing what appeared to be a very complex locking system. Were there lights coming on under the metal? It looked like it; the glow was minor, looking like a stray shaft of sunlight falling on the lid, except they were underground and there were no windows here. Jack's lack of reaction to this suggested that was supposed to happen. "But why did Harold Dorsey kill himself in front of Ianto? Why did he ask for help?"

"Distraction. They needed to get into the Hub as soon as possible, so they made sure he would. Then they sent us on wild goose chases, with the hopes of leaving Ianto alone in the Hub. Which did happen, but they were unable to take him over completely before we returned."

"That whole monster in the bay thing?" He simply nodded. "Why? What did they need the Hub for?"

"The Rift. I'm not sure of the exact plan, mind you, as I killed Strain before he could do the James Bond villain thing of spilling his big super secret world domination plan to me. But if it stuck to what happened long ago ... long ahead. Oh fuck it, time travel nonsense. Anyways, the plan then was galactic colonization; I doubt it's changed. But maybe Ianto can tell us."

The case opened, seemingly of its own accord. Instead of flipping open, the top of the case retracted inside itself, revealing two semi circular shaped silver objects. They looked like stylized half helmets, and she couldn't help but get up and go have a closer look. As Jack lifted one of the gleaming chrome helms out of the case, she picked up the other one. "I thought you were going to help him, not dress him up like a gay centurion. Ow." Picking up the helmet – which was surprisingly heavy for such a meager thing - she felt a prick on her finger. She lifted up the half helmet, and saw that the interior was covered with thousands – millions? - of tiny, hair thin needles. And were they ... were they moving, or was that a trick of the light? They were black, like panther fur, and it could have been an optical illusion. But still, she had to resist the urge to lob the thing across the room.

"Centurions weren't gay, they were bisexual," Jack replied. "And besides, these aren't camp enough to be Roman."

"Is this alive, Jack?"

He put the helmet he had on the end of Ianto's bed, and took the helmet from her with a shit eating grin. "Depends on your definition of alive."

"Oh, you are so explaining that." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement in the case, and looked at it in time to see what looked like a liquid metal tower growing out of it. It got to about a meter in height and then stopped its upward growth, trading that for horizontal grow, as it sent out two branches that grew to ten inches before opening up what almost looked like lacy leaf fronds. With that done, a light glowed blue at its base, and it started to issue a hum she felt more in the back of her teeth than actually heard. "Um, is this supposed to be happening?"

"It is. This is the syna-neuronal nexus. I've decided to call it Esme."

"You're just doing this to shut me up, aren't you?"

"No, that's just a happy side effect." At her deadly look, he quickly explained, "This is an Elusian device whose name can't actually be translated to Human, so let's just call it an artificial telepathy antenna. The Elusians are a telepathic race, but when one of their kind was brain damaged, they used this to help restore their brain to the natural order. Also, it was a torture device, but there's no need to get into that. The Elusians are big on artificial enhancement, to the point where, when I last saw them, they were a completely techno-organic race."

"Techno-organic?"

"Half machine, half biological. This is essentially artificial intelligence engineered from natural crystals, metals, and biological material, so it is a alive, in a sense, it just has no consciousness or awareness outside its programmed parameters."

She reached out towards it, and looked to Jack, who nodded at her to go ahead. She touched one of the branches, and it felt as smooth as silk beneath her fingers.

And as warm as flesh. She instantly jerked her hand away, full of a kind of revulsion that seemed atavistic and not at all her. But it was like living mineral; it felt like smooth, hard marble, but with body heat, and something pumping beneath it. Blood? Sap? She almost didn't want to know. But she was sure if she cut it – if she could cut it – it would bleed. "How does this help Ianto? Can it put his mind back to the natural order or whatever?"

Jack grimaced. "Well, see, there's a problem."

"He's not Elusian."

"That's it. But usually the nexus has a guide, a living Elusian who walks the program through its functions. So what I'm going to do is act as a guide. Hopefully the program will understand the structural similarities between my brain and Ianto's brain, and act accordingly."

"Hopefully?"

"No guarantees; I don't know if this has an adaptation matrix or not. But this is the best shot we have of getting him back, barring time travel."

"And that's the last resort?" It was a partial tease, and partially not. She knew Ianto loved Jack; that was obvious. He was totally, madly in love with him, although she thought you needed to be a woman to actually see it. (Owen dismissed them as "shag buddies", while she and Tosh knew, just by the way Ianto looked at Jack, it was much more than that.) But how did Jack feel about him? There were no clues given; as always, Jack presented a smiling poker face to the world. She was kind of afraid for Ianto, actually. He was such a sweet man, and she had the awful feeling Jack was just going to use him and toss him aside. But he was working so hard to save him now she wondered if it was just that he didn't want to lose another member of his team (and certainly not to a personal enemy) or if he really didn't want to lose Ianto in particular. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. It reminded her that once, after noticing several telling glances between Jack and Ianto after a meeting, she told him that if he hurt Ianto, she'd kick his ass. Maybe he took her seriously (and he should have).

The look Jack gave her was slightly unreadable. Tellingly, he changed the subject. "I need you to monitor his life signs. If he's in serious distress – I'm talking heart attack or seizure territory – I need you to break the connection."

"How?"

"Just rip the helmet off of him. It's like a closed circuit, and one interruption will shut it down."

"It won't hurt him?"

"No. It's not made to hurt. As I said, the Elusians are a techno-organic race – all their technology melds seamlessly with biological organisms. You become one with the machine."

Now that sounded positively sinister. "The stuff inside the helmet is alive? And if you say in a manner of speaking I swear to god I will thump you."

That almost made him smile, but he didn't quite commit to it. "It's connected to the nexus. It's how this works without natural telepathy."

"It's telepathic?"

He frowned and tilted his head to the side, a gesture she now recognized as _'kinda, but I don't want to get into it'_. "If I say it, you'll thump me."

She threw up her hands, letting it go for now, but as he carefully slid one of the helmets onto Ianto's head (how did that work? Did those little needle things grow into their brains? Now that she had imagined it she couldn't un-see it, and it gave her a serious case of the creeps. No wonder Jack had hidden it in the vault ...) she asked, "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Should I monitor your life signs as well?"

It was a stupid question, which she knew before Jack shook his head and sat on the empty bed closest to Ianto. "Doesn't matter one way or another. Under no circumstances are you to rip the helmet off of me."

This is how she knew something bad was going to happen to Jack. She'd have entertained the thought of being psychic, but really it was just Jack slipping into his stern "I'm the boss" voice that clued her in. "How bad is this gonna be?"

"Not as bad as if you mess up my hair," he replied, trying to make a joke of it. When he could see that didn't work, he added, "Gwen, I was shot in the head a couple of hours ago. If I can come back from that, nothing this can do to me will compare."

That was a fair point. But she hated seeing people suffer, even if it was Jack (and he did sometimes deserve it). "There's been enough carnage for one day."

"Duly noted," he replied, laying back on the bed and sliding the chrome half helmet over his head. The nexus began to glow green now, as if blue was some kind of dormant or neutral color, and the hum increased, enough that she had to take several steps away from it to lessen the feeling that she had a cell phone vibrating inside her own skull.

It was then she noticed the helmets on their heads were melting. No, not melting exactly. Smoothing out, the edges becoming less defined, almost as if ...

... growing into their skin? It looked like it was affixing to their scalps, burrowing like an insect, trying to become one with them.

Well, that must have been what Jack meant by the technology becoming a part of you. She just wished it would have been more figurative than literal.

And how the hell was she going to rip it off Ianto if he was in trouble?

* * *

Ianto just surrendered. At some point, you were just fooling yourself if you thought there was any way you could win. He slumped back into the chair at the table, and stared at Tosh. "So what do I do now?"

She shrugged, sipping her drink. "I don't know. All I know is that things have really gone tits up."

That would have seemed a bit out of character for Tosh, but this was him, so it wasn't nearly as jarring. He lowered his head to the table and just rested it on the scarred wood that smelled very strongly of spilled beer and cigarette ash.

He was just wondering if he could die in his memories, like they said you could sometimes die in dreams, when something funny happened. He had no name for it; it was like a light flashed behind his eyes, and he felt ... something. It was really weird, like a wave of heat blowing past his exposed brain. He never felt anything like it, and wasn't sure if it felt bad or good.

"What was that?" Tosh asked.

"You felt that too?"

"The room whited out for a second."

Ianto sat up and was opening his mouth to respond (the pub looked the same to him), when he saw Jack standing in the center of the room. Another alteration to the memory; Jack had never been here. So Strain was still around, was he (it)? Still fucking with him.

"The Fox and Hound?" Jack asked, surprised. "When did you come here?"

Ianto gazed at him wearily. "Stop it."

"Stop what? I'm just curious."

"Just tell me what you want from me. I don't give a shit anymore."

Jack got a leering smile on his face, like he was about to launch an innuendo, and then he noticed Tosh sitting at the table with him and his smile collapsed like a poorly made soufflé. "You were here with Tosh?"

Tosh eyed him warily, and said, "I don't think he's Strain."

Now that struck Ianto as weird. Had Strain gotten to his subconscious now? "He's not me. Us."

"Hold on," Jack – Strain – said. "Tosh is you? I mean, part of you? What happened here?"

"I'm a representation of his unconscious," she replied. "Who are you?"

"Oh wow, your feminine side is Tosh? Awesome. I knew you two were perfect for each other, I just couldn't figure out how. I mean, a milquetoast and a milquetoast? That doesn't work. On a date you'd both starve to death 'cause no one would be brave enough to signal the waiter."

"Well, he sounds like Jack," Ianto admitted.

"Yes," Tosh agreed, but in a cautious way. "You know he's not really a milquetoast, don't you? He's just quiet. Now I was more your classic milquetoast."

Jack nodded. "I suppose. Although he's not always quiet, you know."

"I used to be more of an extrovert," Ianto admitted, cutting off whatever smutty joke the fake Jack was going to make. "Then the world ended and I just didn't give a shit anymore. I mean, why bother? There was no point. And you should know that since you've been making me relive it over and over again."

"Ianto, it's me. I'm not Strain. Strain's dead."

"Strain would say that."

Jack nodded. "He would. But trust me, he's dead. You know he left your head screwed up a bit, right?"

Tosh looked up at him, and said, "The flash. What are you employing to be here?"

"An Elusian syna-neuronal nexus."

"The thing in the vault?" Ianto asked. "That copper case."

"Yes. And how 'bout you, remembering that off the top of your head?"

"I did the inventory just last month." Jack was giving him a half grin, reflecting a sort of pride, and it struck him then, full force. "Jack, it's really you?"

"I've been trying to convince you of that since I got here." He came over, and although Ianto tensed, still not one hundred percent convinced it was him (he couldn't trust his senses, could he?), he let Jack grab his head and kiss his forehead. He then looked him straight in the eyes. "I got your message about the Weevils. Strain and his fellow bugs are gone. How are you doing?"

"I want to get out of here," he admitted, not sure he cared if it was really Jack or not. "But I can't seem to leave. This is what Strain's done to me? Trapped me in my own head?"

"That would seem to be the case."

"How?"

"My guess? Rerouting neural pathways."

"In English."

"He whipped your brain like a frappachino."

"Ah. Yes, that seems like something he would do." He rubbed his eyes, and inexplicably felt tears coming to them. He was just so fucking tired he couldn't believe it. It felt like he'd been wide awake for eight years. "Get me out of here."

"That's what I'm here to do. Just hang in there, okay? We're almost home."

"He's embarrassed, you know." Tosh said. "He's not sure he can do this anymore."

"Hey," Ianto complained, frowning at her. It wasn't enough his body had betrayed him earlier, now his subconscious was doing it too.

"You fought all the way," Jack said sympathetically. "Of course you're tired."

"And how would you know that?"

"You're still here, you're still alive. If you gave up, there'd be nothing left for me to save." He gave him a squeeze on the shoulder and an affectionate smile. "You are such a stubborn jackass. And that's why I love you, you magnificent bastard."

Ianto smiled involuntarily, almost laughed, because he'd used that line on Jack once. The love part sort of slipped out unintentionally, but Jack seemed willing to let that go. He thought about that thing in the copper case in the vault, and wondered how this could possibly help. For one thing, the metal wasn't actually copper; it looked like it, but it felt like soft hide, almost suede, and it was always warn, roughly body temperature, which was slightly unnerving. Jack had said it was harmless and inert (oh, now there was a worrying term) in its "stowed" state, and not easy to open, as there was a certain protocol you had to follow (as always, he didn't elaborate). He also said it should be considered hazardous, which is why it got placed in one of the more secure areas of the vault. "I thought the Elusian thing was dangerous."

"It's dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands. Not only is the technology centuries ahead of anything else on Earth, but if you really learned how it worked, it could be a weapon of incredible breadth and scope. You could take over the world without firing a shot, and no one would ever be the wiser."

"And you're using this on me?"

"It won't hurt you. Trust me, I know what I'm doing."

Ianto's eyes narrowed skeptically. "That's what you said about the handcuffs."

"Okay, admittedly I made a mistake, but if it hadn't been for the – whoa," Jack exclaimed, grabbing his head and swaying slightly on his feet.

Ianto stood, grabbing Jack to steady him. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Just a bit of a head rush." He gabbed his arms and graced him with a smile, but that's when blood started oozing from his nose, running down his mouth and dripping off his chin. Jack wiped the back of his hand across his nose and stared at the blood smeared there in wonder.

"Jack," he asked, alarmed.

Tosh stood up, and she was glowering, her expression one of almost inhuman rage. "I knew you're weren't going to let your little toy boy die," she snarled, and her voice had become Strain's.

Oh shit. Ianto realized that Strain had once again used him for bait, and once again lured Jack in, all because of him. He was focused on Jack, who seemed to be losing arterial amounts of blood from his nose. Strain's doing? Probably; possibly. Ianto had no idea, and didn't honestly care. He was sick and tired of this, and fed up with being used to hurt Jack.

"You bastard," Jack growled. "How did you escape the nanobots?"

"They were programmed not to pass through the blood-brain barrier. But I had no such restraints. You should have thought of that."

Ianto grabbed Jack's gun, as even in this mental landscape he had it in a holster on his hip, and said, "Just die already," before shooting Strain point blank in the face.


	18. Chapter 18

18

_**Outside the Macaram Starflower**_

Jack knew this ship was big enough to have maybe two EVA suits onboard. Right now, he was cursing his luck for finally failing him, at the worst time possible, and cursing himself for underestimating Strain.

Strain didn't tackle him so much as collide with him, and they went tumbling through space in that curious way – up, down, forward, back, sideways – as his brain desperately tried to make sense of the constant shifting feelings of direction and movement. Meanwhile, Strain seemed to be scrabbling for purchase at the front chestplate of his suit, and it took Jack's reeling brain a moment to realize he was trying to set off the emergency release and expose him to raw vacuum. The whole time, Strain's rant was unceasing in his ears. " - ruined everything you arrogant bastard! They warned us about you, but they said it was easy to distract you. Sex, drugs, anything indulgent and irrelevant, you're the worst humanity has to offer -"

Jack grabbed one of Strain's hands, trying to peel him off of him, and attempted a kick, but that just sent them spinning in a way that made his gorge rise. Without gravity or any kind of boundaries whatsoever, leverage was kind of out of the question. It had been so long since he'd had zero G fighting classes, he couldn't remember how he was supposed to do this. (It didn't help that he was a little intoxicated throughout most of the class, but that wasn't totally his fault – the instructor said they could take anti-nausea medication beforehand, and his choice of meds was just stronger than the typical. And not so much anti-nausea as pro-unconsciousness.) It occurred to him he should try and crack Strain's suit first, but to do so he had to get his other hand free ...

... the hand still holding on to the maneuvering engine. He'd held it in a death grip since being sucked out of the ship, to the point where his fingers were numb, but he still had it.

"I have a right to exist!" Strain yelled, so angry his face was contorting behind his faceplate.

"So did those people you killed!" Jack snapped back, unable to fathom how this lifeform could have lost sight of that so easily. But of course he knew the answer already – lifeforms that weren't like them were beneath them, less important than them. Humanity had been that way too, way back when. It was a sharp learning curve.

Their faceplates were so close they were almost touching as they continued a tumble through nothingness, and Jack could see nothing but a cold arrogance in Sky's face, something alien and implacable. "In the survival game, Jack, all bets are off."

"Yes, they are," he agreed blandly, lifting the maneuvering engine up to Sky's helmet and setting it off. Out here, in the vacuum of space, you couldn't actually see anything, but the force of engagement almost ripped his arm off as it thrust him away from Sky, and Sky's helmet seemed to deteriorate invisibly as he screamed, the heat melting the faceplate.

The scream rang in his ears through the comm system, until the suit was breached and all the air fountained out in what looked like a fragile white cloud of icy mist. Sky tumbled end over end, as still as a mannequin, and Jack watched him with a hard, numb feeling in the pit of his stomach. Something he said had sounded familiar. It sounded like something someone in the Time Agency had said. What?

As he was scouring his memories, the Macaram Starflower's power core reached critical mass. The ship didn't so much explode as vaporize, light bursting through it like a star had come to life in its hold, and he felt the force like a full body punch, not yet far enough from the shockwave to avoid it. He felt it hit him before everything went as black as the space around him.

****

All things considered, things worked out pretty well for Jack.

He woke up on a private starship owned by a couple of amiable, vaguely stoned Salarians, who picked up the distress beacon automatically transmitted by his EVA suit. They knew there had been an explosion and wondered what happened, but didn't ask too many questions, mainly because he was reasonably sure they were smugglers. (From what he could tell, they were moving a drug known as "indigo", a drug that had absolutely no effect on your basic humanoids – damn it! – but could really fuck up reptiloids. While he should have probably turned them in, they did save him, and besides, indigo wasn't really one of the heavy duty drugs. Let the lizard men have their fun!)

He surreptitiously made contact with friends at the Time Agency, and discovered all sorts of troubling things about Strain. It was a Time Agency project; it had gotten out of hand. Officially, the Macaram Starflower encountered an anomalous singularity, and the ship was destroyed, with no known survivors. (As Jack wasn't on the official passenger list, he didn't count.) Although nobody liked the fact that so many innocent people died, they were happy that their ugly little secret was dead.

But was it really? Jack remembered that phrase "the worst humanity has to offer". One of the top brass once described him that way. It could have been a coincidence, maybe ... but no, he didn't trust it. The Time Agency wasn't evil. Oh sure, it had its head up its ass most of the time, but what bureaucracy didn't? It did some good, and not just good in the sense of cleaning up the messes they created (although they did that a lot). But there were things going on that he didn't know about, couldn't know about, such as Strain.

What he did know? Whoever created Strain hated him. And he doubted this was the last he'd hear from them.

* * *

_**Cardiff, Now**_

Strain reeled back from the shot, and Ianto felt a nanosecond of triumph before Jack suddenly shouted "No!" and simultaneously ripped the gun from his hand and shoved him behind him, as if trying to protect him with his body. Didn't make sense, people shot in the face didn't have a tendency to get up again, but all Strain did was reel back, stumbling but staying on her (his) feet.

Strain glared at him as the bullet wound in its face healed up, smoothing over like a special effect. "Stupid, toy boy. I liked you better defeated."

That's when something seemed to explode deep inside his mind.

All Ianto could see was white, and all he could feel was molten hot tentacles, alternately sharp and dull, spreading throughout his brain, digging into the soft meat of his grey matter and ripping it apart. Distantly he heard hideous screaming, but was only belatedly and distantly aware that he was the one screaming.

The pain was so overwhelming that he felt like he'd left his body, although not enough to not be oblivious to it. He was reasonably certain he was on the floor, muscles seizing so hard they threatened to break his bones, but he was mentally noting these things with an odd, clinical detachment. Strain was taking a machete to his brain, and all he could do was take it. He heard Jack shout, "You want me, damn it! Come after me!"

"This is more fun."

The last thing he heard – or thought he heard; it wasn't a clear distinction – was Jack shouting, "Disinfection protocol. Sterilize!"

Now what the hell was that supposed to mean? He had to ask Jack if he lived through this.

Maybe he'd get his chance. Or so he thought for a moment when he came to, tasting blood in his mouth and hearing gunshots, Jack shouting something to Gwen ...

Gwen?

Ianto shoved himself up off the wet pavement, a cold Welsh rain sprinkling down on him and making him feel more miserable than he already did. His head throbbed and his ribs ached, and he wondered if anyone got the number of the lorry that hit him. No, wait, not a lorry – a big alien that seemed to be made of stone.

It appeared to be an eight foot statue of some hideous gargoyle given life, a cross between Queen Victoria and an alligator. It had a long muzzle full of concrete teeth, a basically humanoid shaped torso (although incredibly lumpy; Jack seemed to indicate they were about a dozen breasts, which was a sickening thought), and skin that appeared both scaled and harden, like cooled lava, although it was the color of pasture mud. Jack had said it was a Dendrulite (?), a type of alien he hadn't heard of before or seen in the Torchwood files. Jack said they were bad news (as if its hideous ugliness, imperviousness to injury, and the fact that it was biting the heads off people like sweets wasn't a huge clue), and as far as he knew didn't reveal themselves to the universe until the fifty eighth century, and only then because they got in a war with some very powerful enemies. Jack also added, quite unhelpfully, that most of the Dendrulite had themselves genetically modified for combat, so killing them was a chore. According to him, you could only kill them if you jabbed, stabbed, or shot something into their open third eye (perched helpfully in the center of their forehead). It had to be open as the eyelid was armored, which Jack proved when he shot it in the third eye as it blinked, and the bullet bounced harmlessly off the lid. Gwen had asked if that gave it telepathy or something, but supposedly it was worse than that – it was an infrared eye, allowing them to see heat signatures. The Dendrulite was using it quite a bit, probably due to the fact that it was midnight on a chilly spring evening near the piers in Cardiff. If it wanted to see anything at all, night vision was the only way to go.

He crawled on his hands and knees to the nearest wall of the alley, using it to help him back to his feet, little needles poking him from inside his chest cavity. Broken ribs probably. Bloody hell, he hated broken ribs; they took forever to heal, and their pain was just enough to be near crippling, and yet not warrant much sympathy from anyone. Well, except Jack. Jack would be sorry he couldn't tickle him for a while.

Ianto paused to let the pain settle and spit out some blood as he looked back on the battle scene, which had moved further down, towards the old abandoned cannery. Gwen was down, hopefully just unconscious, and Jack was taking a hellacious beating attempting to get close to its third eye, which would probably end in his death. He'd already died once tonight, and they'd only been fighting it five minutes! Jack had some hopes of reasoning with it to begin with, as they weren't unintelligent, but this one seemed to be raving about enemy distractions or something. What was clear was it thought they were the enemy, and was treating them accordingly.

Ianto walked back to the SUV, holding his aching side, and opened the back. Jack always praised him for loading up the vehicle with what they might have needed if everything that could possibly go wrong did, and tonight had been no exception, even though it had been date night. He was bored with fooling around at the Hub and convinced Jack he wanted to go out, have dinner like a normal couple, and after Jack made his little joke (_"Since when are we normal?"_) he realized he was serious about this and agreed. They'd gone to this new Italian place that had just opened up and wasn't too crowded, but the waitress had just showed up at their table when their comms went off, warning them of significant Rift activity. It was the Denrulite coming through, and they were just out the door of the restaurant (of course Jack had to pause a moment to flirt) when they got word of the damage it was causing. It showed up, and almost instantly started killing people. The only bit of luck they had was it had come through on the pier, in an uncrowded place, on a night when most people wouldn't be out.

Although there was always gear piled on top of it, there was a false floor in the back of the SUV, where he stored bigger and/or more volatile weapons. It was here that Ianto found and started assembling the RPA .50 calibre sniper rifle, that he'd never gotten a chance to use in the field. He was pretty good with it on the target range, though, so he hoped that was enough.

He hefted the rifle across the front bonnet, resting the bipod on it in time to see the Dendrulite toss Jack's limp body aside like a sack of garbage and turn away, galumphing away on clawed feet. Already it had forgotten about him, dismissed him, and for some reason that made him angry. Spoil his night out and just walk away, would it? "Oi, ugly! Where do you think you're going? We're not done here!" he shouted, sighting down the barrel. The lighting here was very poor, so all he had to go on was the night vision scope attached to the rifle, and all it did was wash everything out to a sickly, ugly green. Rain was drizzling into his eyes, down his neck, soaking his shirt.

The Dendrulite had a tendency to talk in both an alien language and what sounded like French accented English (was this what the French became in the fifty eighth century? He hoped not ...) so he wasn't surprised when it turned back around and said something he couldn't make out, save for the word "Jack". It started stomping down the alley towards him, either not noticing the sniper rifle or not really caring, and it had a crack at English. "They know you, Jones! They know you're his! They'll be coming for you too!"

Although the fact that it knew his name was a little startling, he paid no attention to it. He was completely focused on its third eye, staring at it down the scope, willing it to blink. It was hard not to keep blinking himself, the rain just had to pick up right this second, but if a Welshman couldn't take the rain he should just move to bloody Spain. "Who's they?" he called back, just out of curiosity. Raindrops stung his eyes, but he did his best to ignore it.

It responded in what he assumed to be Dendrulite, although it sounded an awful lot like mud burbling through a drain pipe. And then Ianto saw it blink.

He instantly squeezed the trigger, and felt the jerk of the rifle against his shoulder, and since he was crouched down beside the SUV at an awkward angle it almost sent him sprawling on his ass. There was no getting around the fact that a fifty calibre had a hell of a kick.

The bullet hit its eye dead center, and he heard a noise, a sound like someone punching a side of beef. It wavered on its feet for a moment, and then toppled like a felled tree, hitting the pavement hard enough that he heard some of it crack on impact. "You really should have come in peace," Ianto said, carefully disassembling the rifle. It was still hot around the barrel, but a couple minutes out in the rain should cool it down to a decent level.

He heard a loud gasp, Jack coming back to life, and he sat up almost instantly. "Bastard! Get your – holy shit." He popped up to his feet and walked down towards the body, gazing down at its head. "Hot damn! I think you won the big stuffed panda, Ianto. Hell of a shot." He looked at him curiously, head canted to the side. "What did you use, an elephant gun?"

"No, I forgot to bring that,"he said dryly, wiping the rain out of his eyes.

Gwen groaned and Jack went to help her up, so Ianto lost his chance to ask him if he had any idea who the "they" were that was supposedly coming for them.

Oh well, not important. They'd probably find out soon enough.


	19. Chapter 19

19

Gwen was just standing there, waiting for something to happen, when she heard a familiar beeping noise down in the central hub. She went downstairs to check on it, and it was just what she thought it was: the Rift activity monitor. Checking the readouts, she saw there had been an intense but very brief flare up of Rift energy somewhere just off Station Road. She did a search of the database, but there was nothing like this energy before. One was close, though – when Captain John came through, although the energy wasn't as intense, and it lingered, whereas this seemed to show up and disappear almost simultaneously. What the hell was this? The fact that it was closest to Captain John's appearance made her really nervous. They didn't need any more mentally unbalanced time travelers running around Cardiff.

Since nothing appeared to be happening with Ianto and Jack, she decided to risk it. "I'm sorry, I'll just be five minutes," she said, grabbing her coat, gun, and a PDA before heading out the cog wheel door. She was in the outer hallway when she almost swore she heard someone – Ianto? - screaming.

But there was no way she could have heard him from here. She dismissed it as her imagination, and continued up to the tourism office.

****

The benefit of having a very long life, one of the few, was you got to experience almost everything.

Zero gee bungee jumping? Use the event horizon of a black hole to slingshot a ship across a galaxy? Hike the vast Akarem desert with enemy reptiloid soldiers in pursuit? Do the dishes? A striptease in a low rent nightclub on Darshan Four? Check, check, check, and huge check. Jack had had a full life, all things considered. Actually, several full to bursting lifetimes, one on top of another. His welcome was long ago worn out, but time refused to kick him out. So he recognized cognitive displacement when he felt it; it wasn't the first time his mind had had someone else's in it, or he'd been in someone else's head.

But there was no getting over the fact that this time it was very weird.

On one level, he was aware of his own mind, but it seemed oddly distant, an undertone to another overtone. He was also aware, much more faintly, of the Elusian's machine attempting to make sense of the alien brain presented to it as a guide. There was an adaptation matrix, but it seemed to be having some difficulty, making him wonder if it was damaged coming through the Rift.

And the mind he was in. Holy shit, the darkness was overwhelming, nearly drowning him in despair. It was pain, deep, bold, and terrible, emotional as opposed to physical, but no better for it. Jack saw a hand, a familiar hand, pulling a semi-automatic handgun, black metal matte finish, a kind used throughout Torchwood, out of a drawer and carry it into another room. The thoughts were running together, a litany that would seem normal to the person who actually owned the mind he was in._ "-overcan'tdoitanymorehurtstoomuchlikeratstearingmeupfromtheinsideouteatingmealiveI'mdeadinsidewhyamIstilldraggingmycarcassaround_

_itwasn'tsupposedtobelikethiswhyisitlikethiswhatdidIdosowrongIcouldn'tsaveherIcouldn'tsavemyselfthere'snopointtoanythingwhyamIgoingthroughthemotionsitdoesn'tmatteranymore-"_

And he was honestly shocked when the man looked in the mirror and he saw it was Ianto, shirtless and bedraggled looking, like he just got out of bed and yet never slept a wink, dark circles like smudges of corkblack beneath his eyes. He pressed the gun barrel to his temple and the cold metal was such a relief he half sobbed. Tears trickled down a face darkened with stubble – Ianto always shaved! What the hell was this? - and he felt a strange calm settle over him. He was going to die now, thank God or Buddha or the Spaghetti Monster or whatever the fuck, he was finally done and it felt like bliss. _" - loseridiotmoronamountedtonothinguselesswasteofspacedadwasrighthewasalwaysright-"_

Jack wanted to tell him not to be an ass, to put down the fucking gun, but he couldn't talk to him, he couldn't communicate with him in any respect. You couldn't time travel into someone else's memory. That was off limits. Only an actual telepath could alter a memory.

"What the fuck, Ian? Put it down!" he ordered, aware it would do no good, but too horrified to much care. Ianto wasn't suicidal! He'd never been ... had he? No! He showed up for work every day, he was always super efficient, always getting the job done, always dependable -

Ianto almost smiled at himself in the mirror, but it was ugly and slightly mad. He was happy he finally got up the nerve to do this. His finger had just curled around the trigger when the phone started to ring. He scowled at himself in the mirror, mentally debating whether he should bother to pick it up or not. "Yes, answer the damn thing!" Jack insisted. Again, spectator, couldn't influence the outcome one way or another, but this was terrible. He was so angry at Ianto right now. What the hell did he think he was playing at? He was in Torchwood! They never lived very long, unless they were him. Why would he want to die when he didn't have to?

But he knew, didn't he? Maybe he always knew, but wanted to pretend that he didn't. Ianto's patient unassuming manner had always been a lie; the smile affixed to his face a mask. He kept up a facade and let no one in, so they couldn't see he was trying to "fix" Lisa, so they wouldn't know how much what happened to her killed him. For so long he had been alone in their little group, and they all pretended not to notice, because it was easier that way.

Ianto thought it might be his sister, so he put the gun down on the edge of the sink and went to answer the phone on the bedside table. Jack was a little surprised to hear his own voice come over the line, booming with confidence, slightly amused. "Ianto, my fine fellow, I need you to meet us at Pier 17."

Ianto considered slamming the phone down (Hey!) But finally he found his voice, and said, "Why's that, sir?" Oh god, robot voice, the one he assumed for orders, where he was pretty much detached from his own body. This was horrible. How had he not realized this? Why did he let him pretend that nothing touched him? The "sir" was always a giveaway. There was a slightly sarcastic tinge to it, but what it actually meant was he was shutting down. He wasn't interacting with a person, he was dealing with an authority figure, something nameless, faceless, as unfeeling as him - or at least as unfeeling as he genuinely wanted to be.

"Seems we have a whole big nest of Weevils -" a pause, and he could hear a female voice in the background. Tosh. "- who says? Fine, sorry, I guess they're technically called a "clutch" of Weevils." Now Owen's voice, in the background, "What, like a purse?" "There's an empty warehouse there and they've taken up residence, the biggest grouping we've seen outside the sewers."

"How big?" He was wondering now if he should go help, try to save someone else, or if he should just agree, return to the bathroom, and blow his brains out.

"Tosh?" There was a pause, and her voice cut on the line. "Readings now stand at twenty three, but there seem to be more converging on the site every minute."

Jack came back on. "And before you ask, no, we don't know why, but we're getting a trace reading of Rift radiation there, so we think something may have come through that's drawing the Weevils to it like flies."

He rubbed his eyes, and Jack felt Ianto's hate of him. It was raw, ugly, and cut deep. He blamed him for Lisa, didn't he? He hadn't forgiven him, not yet.

(Not ever?)

Jack could hear the running litany of _"fuckingbastardfuckingbastardfuckingbastard"_ in Ianto's mind as he replied, "Is anyone in danger?"

"Major. There's a city work crew down on pier sixteen. We tried to pretend we were from the city calling them off, but the foreman's a bastard, he didn't bite."

Ianto sighed heavily, genuinely disappointed that he wouldn't be killing himself today. There was always later, wasn't there? If he didn't get home so exhausted he didn't even have the strength to get undressed. "I'll get them to go."

"Can you? That'd be brilliant."

"It's what I'm here for, sir." _Bastardbastardbastard._

"Then get your cute little ass down here. And bring a weapon. Things could get ugly." Jack then broke the connection, and Ianto put the phone down, standing there staring at the wall for a minute, trying to force his brain into work mode. Finally it happened, and he began thinking of what he could tell the foreman to make him clear out. Environmental hazard? Better - make an enemy of another branch of the department. Say there was a rare species of barnacle put at risk, and an environmental study had to be made before work could continue. It was completely, utterly absurd, and smacked of bureaucracy - they'd buy that without a problem. Only government workers truly understood what absurd meant.

Ianto went to his computer to tap into the Torchwood server, see who was working on the pier and what their number was, and everything in him seemed to shut down. He was trying to cut the emotions off, be a robot, but they festered in the background like an infected wound.

"Ah, sweetheart," Jack said, and wished he could either punch him or hold him. Maybe both. It made him wonder if he still, deep down, hated him.

Would he ever get him to admit it?

****

The disorientation was complete. Ianto felt a deep ache in his head, almost like he had a bruise on his brain, and a sort of warm fuzziness, like his leg had gone partly asleep, only it wasn't his leg, it was his head. On top of all of this, he wasn't even in his own mind anymore.

Or was he? It was so confusing he wasn't sure.

All he knew was he was looking at something he had never seen before. He was seeing an almost cavernous room with a vaulted ceiling, held up by something that looked kind of like a tree, but wasn't a tree. He seemed to think it was coral, but Ianto had never seen coral that looked like that. At the base was a big round console full of lights and controls, buttons and switches and levers and gizmos, many of which the man he was in the head of didn't know the purpose of or function. But he did know he loved it.

He thought this place was gorgeous, beautiful, one of the most astonishing places he had ever been, and since he'd been pretty much everywhere, that was saying something. The TARDIS felt more like home to him than anything ever had.

(TARDIS? What the hell kind of name was that?)

The man was fiddling beneath the console, working with what appeared to be blue glowing tubes, and Ianto recognized the hands. Jack's hands. He was in Jack's head? "Jack?" he asked, but there was no reaction of any kind. He couldn't hear him, could he? He didn't know he was here. How could he be here?

He always thought being in Jack's mind would be a fascinating and/or terrifying place, but right now it was shockingly ... pleasant. He was incredibly happy, and seemed to be wildly pleased to be digging into the guts of the machine, even though he only understood about half of what he was doing. He loved exploring this ship, he loved trying to understand it, he loved not getting it at all. He was jaded, he knew it, and he so rarely ran into something he couldn't quite get his head around eventually, but this was wonderfully puzzling. He was pretty sure he could be here for a hundred years and never figure it all out, and that was exciting. There were so few challenges left, and this was a great one.

A voice with a faint British accent said, "Got the chrono-stabilization matrix fixed yet?"

"Yep, just give me a second, Doctor," Jack replied. Doctor? Holy shit, was this Jack's Doctor? He tried to mentally urge Jack to stand up, to get his head out of the console and look out again, so he could see what this guy looked like. Jack seemed to idolize him, and yet he rarely talked about him in depth. Ianto almost felt a bit jealous, although not because he thought he was in love with him, just because he was such a big part of Jack's life and he kept him separate somehow.

Jack was connecting one blue glowing tube to a yellow glowing tube, and Ianto realized how shocking this was. Jack happy. There was no angst, no tortured thoughts, no guilt, no regrets, no century of baggage – he was just lighthearted and free. How bizarre. He'd never thought of Jack that way, and yet he couldn't have always been so dark with a happy go lucky overlay.

In a way, he was elated – Jack was capable of being this way! - but he was also a little depressed – I can't make Jack feel this way; Jack only feels that way about the Doctor and his ship (whatever it was). The console hummed happily, the yellow tube turning green and then progressing to blue, and the panel shut as Jack sat back on his haunches and smiled to himself. "There we go, good as new." He might not know what everything did, but damn it, he could still fix it. Score one for the Time Agent other Time Agents wished they could forget.

Although he understood none of this, although he was aware that his head was aching like someone had used it for a football, he enjoyed Jack's happiness right along with him. It was nice to know he could be this happy, that at some point in his life he was.

Perhaps that meant that, some day, he could be again.

****

Using the PDA to search for traces of Rift energy, she narrowed the location down to a side street so small you might as well call it an alley. Gwen pulled out her gun and listened before looking down the street, but it was empty. Or seemingly so; of course shadows had to cling to the walls as thick as oil, a smelly garbage bin being big enough and full enough to give adequate space for someone or something to hide behind.

Once she had braced herself, she swung into the alley gun first, and said in her best cop voice, "Identify yourself now."

There was no movement, no noise, and the longer she edged down the alley, gun drawn, body tensed, the more foolish she felt. Her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she came even with the bin – nothing behind it but the remains of someone's lunch, and a rat who didn't care about her and didn't look particularly alien.

With no obvious person to confront, she held her gun up and consulted the PDA again, using it to trace the energy to a spot about five yards away. It was just a spot like any other spot, nothing remarkable about it ...

... except that bit of shadow looked solid, didn't it?

It did. She crouched down, and found there was now an object on the spot where the energy had flared and died. It was as big as her palm, flat and rectangular in shape, black enough to look like a pool of deeper shadow. Cautiously, sorry she didn't bring an isolation container with her, she picked it up. It felt like some odd combination of rubber and plastic, soft yet unyielding at the very same time, almost clinging to her fingertips. She felt a sudden revulsion, like she did with that Elusian thing back at the Hub, but it was milder, and she let it pass without shaking it off her hand. According to the scans she'd taken, it was harmless and inert. It just felt intangibly weird.

"What are you supposed to be?" she asked, thinking aloud. Well, maybe she was entertaining the rat. She turned it over and over in her hand, but didn't see what it could be. Alien playing card? Business card? Frozen black hole? Time bomb? Ad for pizza for the forty eighth century? Maybe it was an instruction manual for an Ikea teleportation platform. She could really use one of those.

She stood up, holstering her gun. It was just an object, and a small object at that. She could put it in her pocket. (Thirty first century bus pass?) But that feeling of wrongness, that this thing was radiating a low level field of malice, was growing more palpable by the minute.

She hoped Jack knew what this was. And if he didn't, she hoped he'd let her take it out and shoot it.


	20. Chapter 20

20

There was a disorienting shift, but Ianto was glad his head wasn't hurting as much and didn't much care. Also, he realized he was in his own bed, and that was a relief. Had he been dreaming? Well, weird dream, but working in Torchwood, that was probably to be expected. In fact, it was probably a lucky thing he hadn't had a complete sleep induced psychotic break.

Suddenly Jack grabbed him and straddled him, pinning his hands down to the bed. "You stupid son of a bitch," he exclaimed angrily. For a single second, he thought maybe Jack was role playing, but since when did he ever call him stupid, even as some sex game? Also, he looked genuinely pissed off. "Why didn't you tell me you almost committed suicide?"

He looked up at him, feeling even more disoriented than before. "Umm ... I think I did. I told you after I lost Lisa, I wanted to die."

"Wanting to die is different than putting a loaded gun to your head."

This was genuinely strange. "Uh ... I don't know what to say to this. Do you have any idea how I felt after she died?"

The angry look on his face faltered and fell away. "Yeah, I do. I was in your head." Jack rolled off of him, falling onto his back beside him. "Ah crap." After a brief pause, he admitted, "It's not that I don't understand, 'cause I do. I've been there, I've been in that much pain that I didn't think I could go on ... hell, I've actually committed suicide once or twice. It just didn't stick."

"So I've noticed."

"But that's the thing. I knew there was a probability that I'd come back. You wouldn't have."

He rubbed his eyes, and tried to remember when he almost killed himself. It wasn't that time he took a bunch of pills but didn't apparently take enough, so all he got out of it was the best sleep of his life? No, that probably wouldn't have made Jack this angry.

Then another thought struck him. "Wait a second. You were in my head? Like I was in yours?"

Now Jack looked at him, a faint expression of alarm scudding over his face before he quickly shunted it aside. "You were in my head? What did you see?"

"The TARDIS, is it? The Doctor's space ship."

He didn't quite manage to suppress his sigh of relief. "Oh. Beautiful, isn't it? Most remarkable piece of technology I've ever encountered."

"You did seem to love it." Ianto considered what he'd experienced, and wanted to say _"You love him; you loved your life with him" _but didn't, because it probably would have embarrassed him. After all, people fell in love with Jack and had unrequited love for him, never vice versa. But it was nice to know he was capable of it.

After a moment of uneasy silence, where he was imagined Jack was worrying about how much he'd figured out, Jack asked, "How much do you hate me?"

"I don't hate you. Well, at times."

"I'm serious."

"So am I." Jack was giving him a surprisingly harsh look, and he saw how serious he was. Well, he must have experienced an interesting time in his life. He sighed, and admitted, "I did hate you after Lisa died. I hated you even more than I would have, because I was attracted to you and felt like I was betraying Lisa that much more. But my hate of you couldn't compete with the hatred I had for myself. Does that make you feel better?"

"Not really." He let out a small sigh, somewhat impatient, but mostly frustrated. "Why did you stop hating me? Assuming you did."

"I did. Well, except when you leave the cap off the toothpaste, and you look through my things -"

"I don't look through your things." Ianto just stared at him until he rolled his eyes. "Okay, maybe once or twice. What gave me away?"

"You never put things back exactly as you found them. I bet you think you do, don't you?"

"Don't get high and mighty on me, Mister I-Alphabetize-My-Junk-Mail. We all can't be that fussy."

"I'm not fussy! I'm just organized. And I do not alphabetize my junk mail." He paused briefly. "Just my bills. It makes it easier to keep track of them."

Jack shook his head. "So sad."

He pulled the pillow out from beneath his head and hit Jack with it, and while he grabbed it and elbowed him in the chest as he ripped it away, Jack laughed. He then tossed the pillow away and rolled on top of him, straddling his his hips and looking down at him like he wasn't sure if he should punch him or kiss him. Ianto would have preferred the latter, but wouldn't have been too surprised by the former. He smirked down at him for a moment, then the look faded in increments. "You really hated me. What changed your mind?"

"The memory stone."

"The one we found in the thrift shop? Wow, what happened there?"

He'd accompanied Jack in an attempt to track down an alien artifact that had been leaving a trail of chaos and confusion in its wake (Tosh and Gwen were the other team – Owen was busy doing an autopsy on what turned out to be the burnt corpse of an alien insect). The problem was the rift energy it gave off was so negligible that you had to be within fifteen meters of it to find it, and everyone described it differently, as if it was shifting its shape (actually, as Jack explained later, it had a passive "psychic chameleon field" - it became whatever someone expected to see). They'd picked up a reading from a second hand store near the underground station, and while Jack distracted the clerk with his charm, Ianto walked around the shop with his energy reader trying to find it. He got a reading on a container full of odds and ends, a junk drawer full of everything from mismatched silverware to old radio tubes. He was sifting around it carefully, trying to find the object that was actually giving off the energy, when he accidentally made contact with it.

It was instantaneous. He felt the briefest tingle in his hand before he suddenly found himself back in time, in the small kitchen of his London flat, making toast, and chiding Lisa about being late for work. He was aware this was the last day before the Canary Wharf incident, but it was like his contemporary consciousness was shoved back into a strange limbo. He was screaming at himself to tell her not to go to work, to go ahead and take that impromptu trip with her to Calais, but he hadn't actually time traveled: it was all memory. He was simply reliving a day, and couldn't change a goddamn thing.

It was agony at first, it felt like a knife had been driven into his gut and was being slowly twisted, but he began to realize something as the day continued on. It was that part he admitted to Jack. "Reliving my time with Lisa, I realized that I never saved her, that she was dead the moment I pulled her out of the cyber-conversion unit. I think I always knew that, but I didn't want to believe it. I wanted to believe I could save her, I wanted to believe I could bring her back. I didn't want her to be dead, and because of that, because I was so selfish and stupid, innocent people died, and I did something so monstrously idiotic -"

"No," Jack said, putting a finger on his lips to silence him. Ianto sniffed and tried to blink the tears out of his eyes. "I think it's time to stop hating yourself. You can't live in the past – believe me, I know – you just have to keep moving forward. We fuck up, we all do, but at least you fucked up out of love. That says something about you."

"That I'm an idiot?"

"That you are a romantic, and despite your sarcasm, not a cynic. That's pretty marvelous." He paused briefly. "See, I knew it wasn't allergies."

Ianto came out of reliving the day when Jack grabbed his arm and broke the connection with the memory stone. It seemed like several hours had passed, but only a minute or two had in real time. He found that he had been crying, and when Jack asked him about it, he claimed a dust allergy and quickly turned back towards the junk drawer. He had a container for the object, so using a nearby scarf in lieu of a glove, he willed the object to look like a rock, a nice piece of granite, and it did, so he easily found it in the drawer and was able to put it in the box without further deja vu. Tosh scanned the hell out of it, but wasn't able to determine why it did what it did, or why it called up memories in people that were generally fraught with some high emotion. Jack said they were used as grave markers on certain planets, a way of allowing families to recall good times with the passed on loved ones. He figured, since it wasn't just making people recall good times, that it was damaged or faulty somehow. That made as much sense as anything. "It was the best I could do with two seconds notice."

"Gotta think faster on your feet."

He scowled up at him. "One second I'm in a coffee shop near Brixton on a sunny day, and then next second I'm in a thrift store in Cardiff on a rainy night. See how fast you think under those circumstances."

"Still, allergies?" He scoffed in a mocking manner. "Why not tell me you got some grit in your eye? Remembered a childhood pet who died when you were three?"

"Right, that's it." He grabbed Jack by the arms and rolled over, so he had him pinned down to the bed by his body. Jack snickered and put up token resistance, but not much.

He grinned up at him, a twinkle in his eyes. "Is this feisty Ianto back? Good. I like him."

"So who's mind are we in now?"

"Good question." Jack looked around, and said, "Well, this is your place, so I'm gonna guess your mind."

He smiled down at him. "Good." He kissed him, hard enough to bruise his own lips.

He had enough torture for one day – now it was time to have some fun.

***

Epilogue

The Elusian syna-neuronal nexus turned out to be too much for Strain. Where nanobots failed, the Elusian device succeeded. When Jack ordered it to go into sterilization mode, it sought out any foreign organism and destroyed it, and Strain couldn't escape. The bad news was this meant Ianto was unconscious for several more hours because of the sterilization protocol; the good news was, if he had ever been exposed to mad cow disease, it was no longer a worry.

Jack regained consciousness first, and returned to his office to find Gwen waiting there. She'd come back with an alien object she had just recovered (and couldn't figure out), but that wasn't completely what she there about.

Seeing the small black object in the case, he knew exactly what it was, and felt a nervous twinge in his stomach. (No, it couldn't be ...) But he told her, "I have no idea what this is. Unless ..." he snorted humorously.

"What?" she asked, eyes widening slightly. Good, she was buying this.

"It's an ad."

"What?" Now there was skepticism in her voice. Had to reel her in.

"Well, it's broken, but most of the major worlds have these hovering around, showing 3-D ads, usually in stores, but they have billboard sized ones that float around major cities. You think advertising is bad now, wait until the thirty fifth century; it's bloody inescapable. They narrowcast ads into your dreams."

"They do not."

"They do! Until the universal court declares them an invasion of privacy. But even then, the occasional hacker still did it, until – yeah, I'm giving away too much. Anyways, it's a busted ad float. Nothing worth worrying about." He put the cover back on the container and put it down behind his desk, like he intended to throw it in the vault later.

She still looked skeptical. "Why would it drop through the Rift?"

"Best guess? Somebody deliberately kicked it through. You don't even want to know how annoying some of these things are." He took a breath and gave her his most offhand, charming smile, pretending he wasn't dying to open the container and find out exactly what was waiting on the data pad for him. "Was there something else?"

For a moment, it seemed like Gwen wasn't going to let this go, but she did, and he was grateful. "Actually, yeah. The Koslovains."

"What about them?"

"Why did Strain set that up? In fact, how? Ianto was there. Did they think he wouldn't come? Why even bother, in fact? What was the point?"

With the data pad, he now knew what the Koslovains were actually about, but it wasn't something he could share with Gwen. So this is where his greatest superpower came into play: lying. No one could lie better than he could. "Honestly, I don't know. But I'm pretty sure the Koslovains were infested by Strain. My best guess would be it intended to infect you as well as everyone else in the diner, but never quite contained the Koslovains natural lethality."

"So it was just another trap?"

He nodded. Of course this was bullshit, as Strain could only infect mammalian lifeforms, and Koslovains were insectoids, but she didn't know Strain like he did. Only one other group he could think of knew the Koslovains that well, beyond the Slovai, and they were also big users of the data pad. They were also responsible for Strain. Of course this was all connected, but since Gwen didn't know what the connecting factor was, she'd never pull it all together.

The connecting factor was him. And he'd never admit it.

Reluctantly she seemed to accept his explanation, and when he told her to go ahead and leave early, she accepted the invitation eagerly. In Torchwood, the ability to leave early didn't happen often, and then it was usually cut short.

Jack poured himself a glass of water and started going through paperwork until Gwen left, the cog wheel door rolling shut behind her. Only then did Jack pick up the container and put it on his desk, stripping the lid off and picking up the data pad. He felt the smart polymer sample his DNA, clinging to his fingers like melted wax, and then it came on, lighting up a faint blue as a message began to scroll above it like a holographic text message. There was no sound, no visual representation of whoever sent it, but this was the safest way. The Rift energy could possibly corrupt more complex data, but this was as simple as it got.

It read: _We know when you are. Did you think it would be that easy, Jack?_

His heart sunk. The Time Agency knew when and where he was.

John had said there weren't any Time Agents left, but would this be the first lie John told? Hardly. Besides, when you were an agency that dealt with time travel, this could be coming from the fiftieth century, not necessarily the fifty first. This could be coming from any when. The data pad was regulation spec – all he could tell was it was made around the fiftieth century, but there never had been much upgrades in the design.

Whoever in the Time Agency was after him, they were trying to make it known that he hadn't been forgiven or forgotten. Strain was phase one, and the Koslovains were phase two. They wanted him punished, and if he couldn't die – he had to assume they knew that now – then they were content to kill people around him, kill his team, until he got the message.

Here was the problem – what was the message? What did they want from him? He hoped it was an apology, because they'd have to show up in person for that, and he'd be able to settle this once and for all.

Jack put the pad half way over the edge and brought the flat of his hand down hard on the overhanging pad, causing it to snap in half. As it was meant to, damaging it triggered a self-destruct mechanism that reduced it to a handful of dust. (In case one got lost in an earlier time period, it couldn't be retro-engineered; as soon as you cracked the case, it released a specifically engineered bacteria that ate the polymer of the pad and its components, excreted them into dust, and died. A perfectly self-contained method of disposal.)

He brushed the dust off his hands and walked to the window, overlooking the currently empty Hub. He wondered who it was, why they wanted him so bad, and how he could get them to go away without getting Ianto and Gwen tangled up in this mess.

And he shuddered to think what phase three might be.

* * *

The End


End file.
